Re: [PATCH] CodingGuidelines: recommend gender-neutral description

From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 15, 2021, 17:27 UTC
Message-ID: <2bdd27b7-cbe1-6952-eca0-f6fcecdaec8c@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAPig+cT24=jy65C1cQ4WarakJHKm4F8_78nDm=jWOnHxfhtcRw@mail.gmail.com>

On 7/15/2021 12:35 PM, Eric Sunshine wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 12:25 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> diff --git a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines
>> @@ -541,6 +541,49 @@ Writing Documentation:
>> +      A contributor asks their upstream to pull from them.
>> +
>> +    Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to those who
>> +    learned English as a second language in some parts of the world.
> 
> It also sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to this native English speaker.

A way to adapt this idea more generally would be to pull a phrase from my commit message in v3:

  Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to readers
  who learned English in a way that dictated "they" as always plural.

Learning English as a second language is one example of how one could find it ungrammatical. We could call it out explicitly:

  Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to readers
  who learned English in a way that dictated "they" as always plural,
  especially those who learned English as a second language.

Thanks, -Stolee