Destin's channel is one of the older, best-known channels in the YT's educational sphere. Recently, the US Navy even let him on a multi-day tour of a nuclear submarine and tape classified information (later redacted). He himself worked in the military. I don't think that it's fair calling him a random youtuber, to me he seems like the perfect youtuber to interview such people (as Destin himself has a background in rocketry).
Funny, I wouldn't use the word contrasting, I thought it was cool that their goofing was was around smart stuff. (probably just because I didn't know much about how a carburetor works, and after watching the video, know much more)
Destin has also peaked (or very close to it) in importance of person interviewed, as he interviewed Obama during their presidency. Though, sadly not an hour long. https://youtu.be/GpWQHFzrEqc
Just out of curiosity, is it considered best practice these days to use the gender-neutral "their" even with a specific subject (Obama) who is known to use masculine pronouns for himself?
As someone tuned in to queer twitter I can say that if you know someone’s pronouns you should use them, so ideally for Obama you would use he/him. But also we’re all using they/them a lot more for people when we’re not sure and that can bleed in to people even when we do know their pronouns, and generally that’s not a big deal. Only becomes a problem when a trans person has a clear preference for she/her or he/him (or anything else) and a person repeatedly and willfully uses they/them, as that can be used to deny recognition of someone’s gender identity. But it’s generally not a problem if you use they/them for a cis person once, that can just slip out. We’re more sensitive around pronouns for trans people, since they are much more likely to have trauma around that. They/them is cool for someone with unknown pronouns but it’s best to politely ask as soon as possible and begin to use the preferred ones.
OT: I use they/their by default, unless I know otherwise, but what to do with other common gendered terms such as Mr./Ms./Mrs, Sir/Madam/Ma'am/Miss?
These aren't avoidable problems: e.g., in the greeting for a business letter ('Dear ...'), or when getting the attention of a member of restaurant waitstaff whose name I don't know, etc.
Someone needs to come up with a plausible set of gender-neutral terms. They/their/them works for she/hers/her/he/his/him circumstances, but the needs are broader than that.
Mostly I’ve just stopped using gendered terms. In a business letter even if the person is not trans you can’t assume Mr/Mrs/Ms unless you know. If their name is gender neutral or ambiguous I would say “Dear First Last,” though that’s even US/western-centric as not all cultures do it that way. If it’s a really important business letter you should probably find out the persons gender using some other channel. Also if the person has a title like Dr or Professor you can use that.
Some people use Mx as a gender neutral but I don’t think that would fly with a more conservative minded person.
> If it’s a really important business letter you should probably find out the persons gender using some other channel.
Preferred form of address, not just gender, and this has been the rule for quite a long time. Even within the classical binary, there are all kinds of variations of status, preference, relationship with the sender, etc., that feed into that.
John Smith (a man) might be properly referred to in a salutation as any of:
“Mr. Smith”
”John”
“Dr. Smith”
“Your Excellency” (without the “Dear” that would prefer the others)
“Rev. Smith”
“Father Smith”
(And most of these correspond to one or more different forms that would be used in the main address, as well.)
I think we can't avoid these issues and need to come up with solutions.
I've never seen Mx, so I think many people would wonder what it meant. Just "M." seems better and matches other usage (though outside contemporary English).
Sure. I would imagine there has been a lot of discussion around this in certain circles. Probably no shortage of good ideas. I think culturally we need to get to the point where most people accept gender as self identified, and the rest will shake out over time.
Just noticed this. I'm puzzled why my comment attracted downvotes.
I typically lean towards gender neutral terms in my speech, but this actually wasn't one of those cases. I had originally used "his", but noticed it resulted in he/him/his referring to two different people. "Destin has also peaked [...], as he interviewed Obama during their presidency." vs "Destin has also peaked [...], as he interviewed Obama during his presidency."
Obviously, Obama was president and Destin wasn't, but the sentence still reads more weirdly with the grammatical implication that Destin was president.
I think it would be nice if English evolved to only ungendered pronouns. Eliminates accidental offense while also reducing everyone's cognitive load.
Also, you reminded me of a quote from yesterday: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore."
I don't disagree with you, but I think it's worth pointing out that there is a pragmatic benefit to gendered pronouns.
You can think of pronouns as sort of like `$?` in bash or `_` in Python's interactive shell. They give you a short way to refer to a previously mentioned noun. When you have more than one of these "special variables", you can use them more often as long as they conveniently get uniformly distributed across the previously mentioned nouns.
So, in English, you can say:
"Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift."
The second sentence can use two pronouns because they happen to be unambiguous. With only a single pronoun, that sentence ends up like:
(This is obviously an extreme example for comedic effect.)
This is also why Romance languages have noun gender for inanimate objects where actual biological gender isn't meaningful. It's not about genitals, it's about scattering a few pronouns uniformly across the noun space.
Of course, one might rightly argue that gender is not a good mechanism to use for your pronoun distribution. We could do something like shells do where we assign pronouns based on recency of the mentioned noun. Or some other system.
But my point is that gendered pronouns aren't completely bananas. They serve a pragmatic function.
Interesting rationalisation for gendered inanimate nouns in romance languages, thanks. Also used in many/most other Germanic (and other language families?) right? Is your explanation a personal inspiration or established theory? For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that?
IMO grammatical gender in Indo European languages (of which the Germanic and Romance language families are a part of) reflect how nouns and their references (pronouns, adjectives etc) are semantically linked by modifying the word endings of the latter to better reflect those of the original noun - I like to think of it as the equivalent of type suffixes in assembly language.
> So, in English, you can say:
"Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift."
Actually in that example, you still don’t need gendered pronouns to resolve ambiguity: “they enjoyed the gift”.
