WaPo Drops the Mic on "He or She"

December 14, 2015 7:37 AM

The Washington Post has updated its style guide: "e-mail" is now "email", "Web sites" are now "websites", and perhaps most significantly, "they/them/their" will now be used as gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronouns, instead of defaulting to "he/him/his" or recasting to make a sentence plural (e.g. "Readers will have their own opinions" will now be the more precise "Each reader will have their own opinion."). Post copy editor (and proprietor of The Slot) Bill Walsh notes "I suspect that the singular they will go largely unnoticed even by those who oppose it on principle. We’ve used it before, if inadvertently, and I’ve never heard a complaint."
posted by Etrigan (98 comments total)

Well, good for them.
posted by Pendragon at 7:38 AM on December 14, 2015 [15 favorites]

I suspect that the singular they will go largely unnoticed even by those who oppose it on principle.

Exactly.
posted by Grangousier at 7:39 AM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

Good. The NYTimes recently added "Mx." as an honorific. Hoping that will catch on as well.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:39 AM on December 14, 2015 [10 favorites]

I still feel weird spelling it "mic". I don't mind doing it, but it's something I'm still not used to.

Probably because I rarely ever write anything about mics.

...Gah, see? That's so weird for me.
posted by KChasm at 7:41 AM on December 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

We’ve used it before, if inadvertently, and I’ve never heard a complaint."

Because they died at that very moment.
posted by Brian B. at 7:43 AM on December 14, 2015 [22 favorites]

I was a little surprised that the singular they has drawn stronger online reaction, both positive and negative, than the other style changes, especially because we are approaching it pretty cautiously. The stylebook entry retains the old advice to try to write around the problem, perhaps by changing singulars to plurals, before using the singular they as a last resort.

So, not a complete switch to singular they, but it's only a matter of time.
posted by notyou at 7:47 AM on December 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

The singular they in English is older than you think. Nice for WaPo to catch up. I use it naturally enough, but I'm a bit flummoxed by the reflexive.

They see themselves as a hero
They see themself as a hero

The former sounds more correct to me, but the latter is more precise. From my extensive research (3 minutes on Wikipedia) this bit of grammar lacks consensus.
posted by Nelson at 7:53 AM on December 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

Huh. This could end up making my life a lot easier.
posted by sunset in snow country at 7:53 AM on December 14, 2015

This is great, and I hope more publications follow suit.

One thing that has encouraged me about the growing acceptance of singular "they" is that the discourse surrounding grammar seems to have improved. Sure, there are still hordes of misinformed pedants who will post nonsensical objections and WaPo for the downfall of civilization or whatever - but at the same time, I feel like a lot more people recognize the conventional (not inherently more correct) nature of "proper" language, and are willing to critically evaluate the rules.

It's nice.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:55 AM on December 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

"e-mail" is now "email"

No, no, no. Wrong as wrong can be. Look, English has a very straightforward guideline for what happens when a the first word of a two-word phrase gets elided down to a single letter. If you want to write email, you'd better be prepared to commit to this and write abomb, bmovie, csection, dday, ecommerce, fstop, gstring etc.

Everything else: whatevs.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:55 AM on December 14, 2015 [13 favorites]

I wonder to what extent the focus on grammatical uniformity is a way to avoid the much thornier problems of avoiding bias and ensuring stories are factually accurate. Because the issue doesn't seem to really merit the degree of time and effort spent on it, considering how good humans are with error correction when it comes to parsing language and how bad they are at critical thinking.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 7:57 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Why? I hate to break it to you, but email is standard English and has been for a while. You might as well complain that people talk about scuba gear instead of SCUBA gear, and don't you know that SCUBA is an acronym?
posted by Elementary Penguin at 7:58 AM on December 14, 2015 [24 favorites]

the issue doesn't seem to really merit the degree of time spent on it

This applies to almost every bit of linguistic pedantry—singular they, split infinitives, double-space after period, internet vs. Internet, the Oxford comma, etc.
posted by Rangi at 7:59 AM on December 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

And for that matter, what exactly is the elided first word in B-movie, D-Day, or g-string?
posted by smackfu at 8:00 AM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

For all but F-Stop I've seen those abbrevs written with spaces instead of hyphens.
posted by LogicalDash at 8:00 AM on December 14, 2015

That's good, but what are we going to do about the word 'moist'?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:00 AM on December 14, 2015 [11 favorites]

In 5 years, the New Yorker will drop the hyphen from e-mail, but so as not to confuse the reader it will be rendered ēmail.
posted by mubba at 8:01 AM on December 14, 2015 [57 favorites]

And for that matter, what exactly is the elided first word in B-movie, D-Day, or g-string?

The D stands for "day".

The G stands for "groin" or "girdle", probably.
posted by Etrigan at 8:03 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Email" predates "e-mail" by more than a decade. The hyphen is somebody's imaginary correction of an already-standard spelling. (Literally: the IETF requires the spelling "email" in RFCs.)
posted by ardgedee at 8:06 AM on December 14, 2015 [29 favorites]

I wonder to what extent the focus on grammatical uniformity is a way to avoid the much thornier problems of avoiding bias and ensuring stories are factually accurate. Because the issue doesn't seem to really merit the degree of time spent on it, considering how good humans are with error correction when it comes to parsing language and how bad they are at critical thinking.

It's all of a piece, which Walsh explains in the FPP:

Publication style is largely about consistency and polish, which in turn can represent credibility — if we can’t decide whether we use gray or grey, can you trust our attention to detail in stories about campaign finance or nuclear weapons?

If you think newspaper comment sections are bad now, go ahead, drop the style guide and welcome legions of grammar Nazis hot to share their two cents along with the regular kind.
posted by notyou at 8:07 AM on December 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

Good. The NYTimes recently added "Mx." as an honorific. Hoping that will catch on as well.

Good, I hope not, since it's pronounced 'mix" and we already have a perfectly good use for that word.

Not get off my lawn unless you have candy.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:07 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

mubba wins.

Actually, in the olden days of metal newspaper type it was very common to shorten words whenever possible, to save space.
posted by Melismata at 8:07 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

We've been debating this for a while.
posted by cardboard at 8:07 AM on December 14, 2015

I'm sure the commenting armies are going to have a lot of really crappy things to say about this out there in the hinterland battlefields of the ideological internet wars.
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:12 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

*fans self*
posted by AndrewInDC at 8:12 AM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

I support removing any and all punctuation within words.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:17 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

The neerdowells won't like it.
posted by nom de poop at 8:23 AM on December 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

Good. The NYTimes recently added "Mx." as an honorific. Hoping that will catch on as well.

I hope so too, but using it in one article where they're literally defining it as a term one person "insists" upon doesn't set much of a precedent. And it still hasn't been added to their guidelines.
posted by zarq at 8:30 AM on December 14, 2015

I'm usually such a pedantic jerk* about grammar, but I am 100% in favor of this. In fact, it's been something I've been hoping would catch on for awhile now because I think it's so much better than the alternatives. For example:

1. "He/she" and "him/her": So awkward and stilted; also still stuck in a gender binary.

2. Defaulting to "he/him": I think at this point most people have come to accept why this is obviously problematic.

3. Defaulting to "she/her": While I appreciate the attempt to balance things out, I still think it
doesn't make sense to assume one gender, and like going with he/him, it has the potential to cause legitimate confusion.

4. Alternating between the two (as I've seen in several textbooks): Just downright confusing.

5. Making up a brand new, singular, gender neutral word: Nice idea, but seems unlikely to catch on in practice.

6. Rephrase everything to avoid singular: often makes sentences that are unnecessarily convoluted, and it's pretty annoying to have to do.

Oh, also, I'm team email instead of e-mail.

*In my own head at least. I realized many years ago that people don't actually appreciate it when you correct their speech or go on long rants about the benefits of the Oxford comma.
posted by litera scripta manet at 8:36 AM on December 14, 2015 [14 favorites]

Publication style is largely about consistency and polish, which in turn can represent credibility — if we can’t decide whether we use gray or grey, can you trust our attention to detail in stories about campaign finance or nuclear weapons?

This argument is nonsense though. It gets the process backwards. Readers take issue with the content of the article first and then attack the usage. No matter how comprehensive the style guide is, and how closely the editor hews to it, a nitpick will always be found. Because it's not really about grammar. It's about dismissing a viewpoint in the laziest manner possible.

The bulk of good grammar shibboleths have no effect on the clarity or comprehensibility of language. They're traits of the dialects and pedagogy of the wealthy and powerful, and they're employed to dismiss valid arguments from minority opinion without ever engaging with them on a substantive level.

It's a powerful weapon. The Post focusing on trifling changes in their style guides is a whetstone for keeping the blade sharp. We should not encourage it.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 8:37 AM on December 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

"Each reader will have their own opinion."

Isn't the "reader" a myth anyway?
posted by thelonius at 8:38 AM on December 14, 2015

Readers take issue with the content of the article first and then attack the usage.

Not I.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:40 AM on December 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

If ease of typing on the net is also a consideration, we will soon see greater use of lower case and the elimination of upper case . Note too that titles for articles when using a number use the number itself rather than spelling out the number, as was standard, ie,
"10 Reasons to Hate TV," rather than "Ten Reasons to Hate TV" .
posted by Postroad at 8:44 AM on December 14, 2015

"They" sounds anonymous to me, so I wouldn't notice it in "when someone's on fire they should jump in a lake". But "I just saw Bob and they had a hat" is just weird. Pretending nobody cares about gender when people make such a big deal of it when someone changes gender baffles me.
posted by alpheus at 9:00 AM on December 14, 2015

What if Bob identifies as nonbinary and has asked people to use "they?" Singular they doesn't necessarily come from a "not caring about gender" place.
posted by Foosnark at 9:05 AM on December 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

Where is William Safire when we need him?

This is an interesting flashback for me. I was an editor and master of the style guide (no, not the styleguide) 15 years ago at a major university. We had regular discussions about entries and changes to our style guide.

e-mail/email: Some argued for eMail (a la Apple's iPod, iBook, etc.). email won.

website/web site: My take was: misslesite, crashsite...we didn't compound for other uses of site.

I'm confused on the plural/singular (I am not a Post "reader"). Does this mean the Post used to write awkward sentences like, "Each reader will have his/her own opinion." Or (even worse) "Each reader will have his own opinion."

If so, IMHO, they are well behind the curve.

"Mx" seems well ahead of the curve. Not sure how I feel about that one. However, it's the Times; the honorifics have always dinged my grammar parser. I suppose I'd suggest dropping the honorific altogether.

post script: You can have my Oxford comma when you pry it from my cold dead hands....
posted by CrowGoat at 9:07 AM on December 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm sure the commenting armies are going to have a lot of really crappy things to say about this out there in the hinterland battlefields of the ideological internet wars.

I am sure that the pitched battles on Facebook have already begun between the same people who were offended by plain red Starbucks cups and their implacable foes.
posted by briank at 9:07 AM on December 14, 2015

The final dismemberment of Email Limited makes me more comfortable with the dehyphenation.
posted by zamboni at 9:09 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Pretending nobody cares about gender when people make such a big deal of it when someone changes gender baffles me.

This doesn't show lack of care. It's taking care not to cause offense or pain.

I have to say, singular they still sounds wrong to my ear, and I haven't been as forward-thinking about its growing use the past few years as I could have been, but ultimately, if it's going to make someone's day a little brighter or a bit less dark, then it's easy enough to make the switch, and my ear'll adjust, eventually. I'll probably do as Walsh suggests and "write around the problem*" as much as possible in the meanwhile.

----------------------
*"problem" is unfortunate, there.
posted by notyou at 9:10 AM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

Singular they makes me really happy. "He or she" comes up a lot in the writing I do, and it's so annoying and unwieldy and totally breaks the tone of informal copy, so I always try to sneak in a singular they instead. It usually gets caught by some meddling copyeditor, but... sorry, the writing's on the wall, we are making singular they happen. The future belongs to genderless pronouns!
posted by the turtle's teeth at 9:10 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I see hot mic and I hear hot mick. This is going to be a challenge for me.
posted by kanewai at 9:12 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Electronic recording devices, from the cassette recorders on which my brothers and I imitated Johnny Carson to more modern contraptions, have microphone jacks labeled MIC. It’s an abbreviation, never intended to be pronounced as a word, like Chas and Robt and Wm in a phone book.

Funny that in an argument about how language evolves and about how the future is now, a not-insignificant slice of the article's readership is going "What's a phone book, and what does 'Chas' mean?"
posted by mudpuppie at 9:19 AM on December 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

Funny that in an argument about how language evolves and about how the future is now, a not-insignificant slice of the article's readership is going "What's a phone book, and what does 'Chas' mean?"

I was just startled that his first example was the one that's become a fairly common nickname for Charles.
posted by Etrigan at 9:23 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

And for that matter, what exactly is the elided first word in B-movie, D-Day, or g-string?

"B" stands for "B-list", "D" stands for "day" (as mentioned previously), and "G" obviously stands for "gspot area."

As for the singular "they," WaPo could have been even more forwardthinking by switching to "😀."
posted by univac at 9:23 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

"Each reader will have their own opinion."

I wish this were true. My experience is that too many readers lack the confidence to have their own opinions, so they glom to to the opinion of someone else.
posted by layceepee at 9:24 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

CrowGoat: website/web site: My take was: misslesite, crashsite...we didn't compound for other uses of site.

YES! Also: does "website" imply that the Post blesses such clumsy grafts as webserver, mailserver, webpage, tumblrpost, and bloghost? Yuck.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:39 AM on December 14, 2015

Such an obvious solution - this is good news.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:40 AM on December 14, 2015

Foosnark, I'd do as Bob asked. Seems like the only polite thing to do.
posted by alpheus at 9:43 AM on December 14, 2015

I've unapologetically used singular they for decades, but I'll be damned if I ever switch to 'email.'
posted by ob1quixote at 9:45 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

but we still aren’t writing about tshirts and xrays

Well, this is awkward.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:55 AM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

The NYTimes recently added "Mx." as an honorific. Hoping that will catch on as well.

Good, I hope not, since it's pronounced 'mix"

Nope: Minx, with "saucy" as a superlative in the appropriate situations.
posted by bonehead at 10:03 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

To all the folks arguing over email vs. e-mail:

I don't know which one will end up being more widely used, but to all of you:

Stop worrying about it, no matter what you personally do, language is going to evolve and do its own thing, regardless of your pedantic choice. Just do whatever works for you and realize in the end, it doesn't matter anyway.

e-mail be dancin' like this, email be dancin' like that.

Now, if y'all would excuse me, I'm gonna go have a drink with Derrida.
posted by deadaluspark at 10:09 AM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

I still hold out hope for yon/yonder/yonself:
"Please inform yon that yonder mobile phone will be confiscated and smashed into tiny bits otherwise."
posted by damo at 10:12 AM on December 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

The bulk of good grammar shibboleths have no effect on the clarity or comprehensibility of language. They're traits of the dialects and pedagogy of the wealthy and powerful, and they're employed to dismiss valid arguments from minority opinion without ever engaging with them on a substantive level.

Yup. Precisely. Many of them were invented by Victorian grammarians, and to a great extent as ways of continuing to emphasize class differences as literacy became more widespread. For example, the upper classes were still taught Latin -- so they invented out of whole cloth the idea of a split infinitive, because in Latin an infinitive is a single word. There is some truly nasty shit behind the academic pretense of prescriptivism.
posted by tavella at 10:16 AM on December 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

Good, I hope not, since it's pronounced 'mix" and we already have a perfectly good use for that word.

That's a really reasonable reason for not adapting a desired gender pronoun - because no word in English ever has multiple uses. By the way, we fired the guy who keeps up the plants at my office; it was frustrating to watch him miss with the mister; after so many misses it was clear he couldn't master it.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 10:23 AM on December 14, 2015 [7 favorites]

Hm, I wonder what the autocorrect rules for "e-mail" are on the i-Phone.
posted by biogeo at 10:25 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've been advising writers to use singular they and quit worrying about it for, like, ever.

From a website I put up *ulp* eighteen years ago that still gets hits:

Classic Examples

• "Each of them should . . . make themself ready," - William Caxton, ca. 1460
• "God send everyone their heart's desire," - William Shakespeare
• "If a person is born of a gloomy temper. . . they cannot help it." - Lord Chesterfield, 1759
• "Nobody prevents you, do they?" - William Makepeace Thackeray
• ". . . everyone shall delight us, and we them." - Walt Whitman
• "It's enough to drive anyone out of their senses." - George Bernard Shaw

Everyday Examples

• They each nodded their head in agreement.
• If someone asks about the "Help Wanted" sign while I'm out, have them fill out an application.
• Anyone using the pool when the lifeguard is off duty does so at their own risk.
• Did you see who sat in seat 4C? They left their hat behind.
• I don't know whose x-ray this is, but they're going to need root canal surgery.

= = =

And here's an excerpt on hyphens from a style guide I've circulated:

Temporary coinage
Words are often joined temporarily to create modifiers for other words:

• A well-respected organization.
• Hail-damaged cars.
• Multi-user licenses.
• Up-to-the-minute reporting.

Coining new terms (neologisms)
Terminology evolves over time to keep up with changes in technology. New terms, usually nouns, are often created by joining two existing words with a hyphen. The hyphen is required to signal that a new word has been created with a meaning that may be different than that of the two words separately. As the new term gains acceptance, the hyphen is no longer needed and may be dropped.

Some common words that started out at hyphenates:

• type-writer
• aero-plane
• up-date
• data-base
• on-line

Database is a fairly recent addition to the language. As recently as the 1970s it was standard practice to include the hyphen. In 1995 omitting the hyphen from on-line was still controversial. Today, the spelling online is almost universally accepted.
 
posted by Herodios at 10:29 AM on December 14, 2015 [24 favorites]

If ease of typing on the net is also a consideration, we will soon see greater use of lower case and the elimination of upper case .

i hope i am dead before the nyt drops the period because it sounds angry
posted by entropicamericana at 10:31 AM on December 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

No, no, no. Wrong as wrong can be. Look, English has a very straightforward guideline for what happens when a the first word of a two-word phrase gets elided down to a single letter. If you want to write email, you'd better be prepared to commit to this and write abomb, bmovie, csection, dday, ecommerce, fstop, gstring etc.

It really doesn't. We don't call the progeny of a goat and a sheep a g-eep, nor the progeny of a lion and tiger an l-iger. We don't call a boat/hotel combination a b-otel. In computing, when we combine the words binary and digit, we call it a bit, not a b-it. We call video blogging vlogging. we call a Web log a blog, not a b-log.

If the sounds easily elide into each other, portmanteau words often just write them as a single word, rather than hyphenating. But there are no absolute rules in English.
posted by maxsparber at 10:33 AM on December 14, 2015

Gender neutral pronouns, gender neutral pronouns!! /dances/
posted by yueliang at 10:37 AM on December 14, 2015

It really doesn't. We don't call the progeny of a goat and a sheep a g-eep, nor the progeny of a lion and tiger an l-iger. We don't call a boat/hotel combination a b-otel. In computing, when we combine the words binary and digit, we call it a bit, not a b-it. We call video blogging vlogging. we call a Web log a blog, not a b-log.

None of those address ricochet biscuit's point that when we hack all but one letter off the first word and none from the second, we typically hyphenate the combination.
posted by Etrigan at 10:41 AM on December 14, 2015

This applies to almost every bit of linguistic pedantry—singular they, split infinitives, double-space after period, internet vs. Internet,

That is for sure. Can't agree with you more. Down with pedantry!

the Oxford comma

Pistols at dawn.
posted by Celsius1414 at 10:47 AM on December 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

None of those address ricochet biscuit's point that when we hack all but one letter off the first word and none from the second, we typically hyphenate the combination.

Because it's not particularly true? Using "e-commerce" or "e-mail" is a good way to look like an aughts-era SEO company, or a media company with an elderly stylebook. In english, combined words usually progress from hyphen to single word. Some jump straight to single word, some keep their hyphens because the single-word combination is awkward, but the usual flow is towards unity.
posted by tavella at 10:49 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I keep a copy of the 1985 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary at my desk to help me illustrate how language changes in our lifetimes.

Look up the word default in this dictionary. As of the 1985 edition, you will not find the most used -- if not only -- meaning that many people now associate with this word, which is "what an information system does if you don't tell it what you want it to do under a set of circumstances", e.g. default values, default settings, default behavior, etc. This interpretation is simply not present.

The dictionary only mentions the "failed to meet your obligations" meanings, e.g. to renege on a payment, to lose the game by not showing up.

The later computer-oriented usage wasn't cited enough to be include in the dictionary in 1985, although we were wrestling with it -- along with the orthography of "on-line, among other terms -- probably before 1995. This also illustrates how information technology generates entities faster than the language can invent new terms for them: platform, desktop, application, mouse, and on and on.

Did you ever think about why we "drive" a car? Or why the truck drivers union is called the "teamsters"?

I still feel weird spelling it "mic". I don't mind doing it, but it's something I'm still not used to.

Probably because I rarely ever write anything about mics.

Right. But for most people whose job actually involves microphones, including those who label the equipment, the one-syllable abbreviation for microphone as always been "mic". I suppose this could change, too.
 
posted by Herodios at 10:49 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

one of those address ricochet biscuit's point that when we hack all but one letter off the first word and none from the second, we typically hyphenate the combination.

Well, we typically do in computing, especially those that start with e: eBay, ebook, esports, eMac.

Some of them wind up with CamelCase letters, but that just shows that there is no absolute convention.
posted by maxsparber at 10:50 AM on December 14, 2015

And for that matter, what exactly is the elided first word in B-movie, D-Day, or g-string?

Do you mean bmovie, dday and gstring? You are rather grandly missing the point. If it eases your mind, please substitute b-ball, d-pad and g-man.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:52 AM on December 14, 2015

Do you mean bmovie, dday and gstring?

Interestingly, the original spelling of g-string, when it referred to a Native American loincloth, was geestring.
posted by maxsparber at 10:55 AM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

I used to be firmly in the e-mail camp, but email is so common that I started reminding myself of an older English relative who still writes ’phone.

I wonder whether ardgedee can pinpoint when email became the IETF standard. It’s already there in 1996 when MIME was standardized, but neither e-mail nor email appears in the RFC for SMTP in 1981 or the revision in 1982.

Just be grateful we don't live in the timeline where they settled on e’mail.
posted by mubba at 10:58 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well, we typically do in computing, especially those that start with e: eBay, ebook, esports, eMac.

I would say that marketing departments do, and once in a long while it catches on in general use. For a specific product like an iPhone, sure. For something quotidian like e-mail I am perfectly happy not to have everyday usage dictated by the Omnicon Group or aQuantive.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:02 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

*Enjoys tea served in a beautiful and expensive bowl from 3,000 years ago, to celebrate*
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:03 AM on December 14, 2015

Just be grateful we don't live in the timeline where they settled on e’mail.

That's how you send electronic messages to the Na'vi.
posted by maxsparber at 11:03 AM on December 14, 2015

If a crusty old fuddy-duddy like me can get used to a singular "they," the Washington Post can do it, too. After all, we adopted a singular "you" when "thou" went out of fashion.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:04 AM on December 14, 2015

Mayhaps thou hast.
posted by maxsparber at 11:05 AM on December 14, 2015 [8 favorites]

Just be grateful we don't live in the timeline where they settled on e’mail.

That's how you send electronic messages to the Na'vi.

Email (noun)

1. Enduit vitreux souvent coloré qu’on applique sur des métaux, des céramiques.
2. Substance dure qui recouvre l’ivoire de la couronne des dents.
3. (Forme Fautive) Anglicisme pour courriel, courrier électronique.

posted by Herodios at 11:06 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

That's a really reasonable reason for not adapting a desired gender pronoun

I really don't see any reasonable reason for the adoption of "Mx". It does the wrong thing in the wrong way: it emphasizes gender choice. There's Mrs/Ms/Miss, there's Mr./Master, now Mx. This perpetuates and reinforces the gender and sexual-availability coding inherent in those constructions.

We need instead to get away from the idea of embedded gender constructions in my view. If you want to call someone by a polite honorific , lets find a fully-inclusive, non-gendered, non-ageist, non-sexually-availablist way of doing it. I don't really care what it is, but Mx. isn't doing anyone any favours.

Look at it this way, it's exactly the opposite of the choice to use the inclusive they/their. Instead of gendering language, "they" degenders it. Mx. does the opposite, it emphasizes gender, exceptionalizing it.

In media, the answer is fairly simple without any convolutions: use firstname lastname, followed by lastname, where appropriate. Unless your undergarments are more starchy than those of the writers for The Economist, the choice of Mx./Ms./Mr./Mrs. should never come up.
posted by bonehead at 11:20 AM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

the choice of Mx./Ms./Mr./Mrs. should never come up.

If I recall correctly, we can send it back to the 5th dimension by tricking either Marilyn McCoo or Billy Davis, Jr. into saying it backwards.
 
posted by Herodios at 11:30 AM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

Awesome, I never knew "émail" was an actual French word!

"Well, you can try to call before 5PM, but really the best way to reach me is by enamel."
posted by biogeo at 11:33 AM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

New words would have been more fun.
posted by fartknocker at 11:38 AM on December 14, 2015

Awesome, I never knew "émail" was an actual French word!

Not in Canada. Email translates into courriel, at least officially.
posted by bonehead at 11:40 AM on December 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

neither e-mail nor email appears in the RFC for SMTP in 1981 or the revision in 1982.

I'm amused that both of those don't even use "electronic mail". Just plain "mail" everywhere. Good old computer science guys.
posted by smackfu at 11:40 AM on December 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

I hadn't come across Mx before, but it does itself no favours. How is it pronounced? Do you try and swallow the vowel? Haven't seen it on any of those drop-down lists of honorifics, either, where 'none of the above' is so rarely an option.

I think we'd be better off trying to introduce a new ungendered honorific altogether ("Introduce a new ungendered honorific!"). There are plenty of those already - Reverend/Rev can apply to any gender - and I'd gladly adopt something that identified me as a plain human. Ph Devonian, pronounced Fff. suits me fine.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I missed my lunch' to-day and am e-surient
posted by Devonian at 11:43 AM on December 14, 2015

charming habit of using diaereses

I cannot agreë.
posted by Celsius1414 at 12:18 PM on December 14, 2015

Google "e-mail"

About 7,430,000,000 results (0.49 seconds)

Showing results for "email"
Search instead for "e-mail"

Google "web site"

About 5,550,000,000 results (0.36 seconds)

Showing results for "website"
Search instead for "web site"

posted by mhum at 12:19 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Shouldn't it be "Washington Post has updated their style guide?"
posted by hellphish at 12:21 PM on December 14, 2015

I hadn't come across Mx before, but it does itself no favours. How is it pronounced?

You make an "m" sound, and then cover your mouth and sort of cough and mumble, the way you do when you're trying to pretend you know a word you don't, or deliberately avoid being understood.

It looks so glamorous written down, though. Very 1930's secret agent.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:26 PM on December 14, 2015 [3 favorites]

"csection" already happens, at least informally. Or (possibly worse) "c-sec."

I think the reason hyphens vanish has to do with readability. If it reads the same without the hyphen, eventually the hyphen drops away.

For example "dday" doesn't happen because it reads "dihday".

Email reads the same with and without its hyphen.

"Gstring" likewise reads as "juhstring" or "guhstring"; "abomb" kind of works, but the phrase itself is archaic, who says "atom bomb" anymore? So it will just fossilize as-is.
posted by emjaybee at 12:29 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Reminds me of this fantastic bit from Ursula K. Le Guin's book, Steering the Craft.

Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he.

Violation: “Each one in turn reads their piece aloud.”

This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when we’re talking. (“It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses,” said George Bernard Shaw.)

The grammarians started telling us it was incorrect along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. That was when they also declared that the pronoun he includes both sexes, as in “If a person needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents.”

My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I know what I’m doing and why.

posted by davejh at 12:59 PM on December 14, 2015 [9 favorites]

Bonehead: There's Mrs/Ms/Miss, there's Mr./Master, now Mx.

Is it OK to ask whether a young man questioning binary gender could go by "Mix Master," or am I making light of a serious subject?
posted by wenestvedt at 1:06 PM on December 14, 2015

Well, you didn't use it right.

My beëf was not with the usage but with the description of "charming." ;)
posted by Celsius1414 at 2:29 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Google n-grams shows e-mail to be about three times more popular as email.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 2:50 PM on December 14, 2015

ngram is for books, which tend to have house stylebooks. Rather more telling is the fact that when you tell google that yes, you really want to search for e-mail not email, it's not until the bottom of the second page that a single result shows e-mail instead of email in the title or search snippet. People in day to day use primarily use email.
posted by tavella at 3:55 PM on December 14, 2015

You should never trust Google's result counts for anything. Particularly if punctuation is involved. We have no idea what pages "e-mail" actually matches, nor whether the count is at all accurate. (Historically it's been hilariously wrong.)
posted by Nelson at 4:16 PM on December 14, 2015

I like how you accidentally raised the secondary issue of whether one should hypenate n-gram. Google doesn't I guess but I still do because the identification of n as a variable is important. The thing about "e-mail" is that it barely makes sense to think of "electronic" mail as a particular variety of mail in this day and age. I get "email" and I get "stuff delivered from Amazon."
posted by atoxyl at 6:18 PM on December 14, 2015

charming habit of using diaereses

See, this is one of the many things I love about MeFi: I get to read phrases that simply would not occur anywhere else.

And I, for one, would happily use courriel rather than email. "I received a courriel from him." "I sent you a courriel about that." It's fun to say. And it would be until my fellow Americans corrupted it into another usage of corral.

About much else in TFA, I have feelings. But others have expressed them well, and I need not repeat their fine points.
posted by bryon at 11:17 PM on December 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

G-string vs. gstring, 1980 to present

D-day vs. dday, same time period

C-section vs. csection
posted by Elementary Penguin at 1:07 AM on December 15, 2015

Nelson: I use it naturally enough, but I'm a bit flummoxed by the reflexive.

They see themselves as a hero
They see themself as a hero

The former sounds more correct to me, but the latter is more precise. From my extensive research (3 minutes on Wikipedia) this bit of grammar lacks consensus.

"themselves" is definitely more standard, but I can see it shifting over time. Singular you uses -self. The only thing that makes me think maybe it won't get re-analyzed in favor of themself is that it hasn't yet, and singular they is very old.

Then again, I see in one of the above "classic" examples from the 1400s, it takes "themself". So maybe that's not even correct.

I'd be very interested to see a history of whether singular you ever took yourselves as the reflexive.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:53 AM on December 15, 2015

3. Defaulting to "she/her": While I appreciate the attempt to balance things out, I still think it
doesn't make sense to assume one gender, and like going with he/him, it has the potential to cause legitimate confusion.

Ann Leckie's wonderful Imperial Radch trilogy aside, obvs.
posted by Auz at 3:11 AM on December 15, 2015

The D-day one looks quite different if you disable case-sensitivity.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 3:45 PM on December 15, 2015