Quote:
Originally Posted by frahse
I am a little surprised no one has brought up the old "thou," "thee," or "thine."
|
I don't think these terms are available for serious consideration at this time, and I mean that literally. These archaic terms have taken on an essentially humorous aspect, used in modern speech and writing mainly in exaggerations and similar (and historical reproductions I suppose, although accurate usage even there is often questionable). This doesn't make them easily acceptable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by frahse
I am not so surprised that there was only one slight attempt to address my real question above which is about that group of people that don't obviously identify directly as male or female and cause difficulties when people attempt to speak or write about them.[...]
|
I wasn't surprised because I didn't think the OP was really about this topic, which is far from simple. Would such people even want a genderless pronoun used in their case? Would they really want some new pronoun used to explicitly separate them from "he" and "she"? I would not be surprised if some were offended by explicit non-gender-specific references - isn't the question here usually very gender-specific? (If gender wasn't an issue then it shouldn't matter which they started out as.) But I am only guessing.