From: Felipe Contreras Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2021 21:22:32 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH] CodingGuidelines: recommend gender-neutral description Message-ID: <60f1f898eaea9_14cb208e7@natae.notmuch> In-Reply-To: <2bdd27b7-cbe1-6952-eca0-f6fcecdaec8c@gmail.com> Derrick Stolee wrote: > On 7/15/2021 12:35 PM, Eric Sunshine wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 12:25 PM Junio C Hamano 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. This is loaded language. You are inserting your opinion into the text. Don't. The guidelines are not a place to win arguments. Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to some people. And it sounds ungrammatical because it *is* ungramatical, not only to native English speakers, but professional linguists. -- Felipe Contreras