

Facebook phases out singular "they" - gruseom
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=281

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jacobbijani
It seems like there must be a way to just reform the sentence, solving the
problem from the other end. Use "his/her" when it is known, and a whole new
sentence when it isn't.

"Pat Jones has has been tagged in a photo" or something similar. That removes
the aspect of it being done by themselves though.

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BSeward
I would rather have an ungrammatical (but easily understood) sentence than one
that obfuscates reflexive actions.

Also, publishing alternatively-worded stories for genderless users is a little
bit of a pain for third-party developers. Customizing gender in a feed story
is as trivial as typing "<fb:pronoun uid=/user id/ [+ optionally
possessive/reflexive/objective=true, depending on context] />", customizing
stories based on gender or lack thereof is as nontrivial as 1) registering a
feed template for the new form 2) making an API request for user's reported
sex (or perhaps keeping information from an earlier profile info call) 3)
selecting which template to populate and publish based on the results of that
poll. Nothing outrageous, but potentially annoying for developers with many
newsfeed integration points who want to adhere to first-party publishing
standards.

Also also, [it's been a bit since I've taken linguistics courses, but] there
are going to be situations in non-English languages where you simply cannot
write a sentence without encoding some gender information, wherein reforming
an item to be completely genderless (and grammatically not inelegant) wouldn't
be possible.

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aneesh
This is on the front page of HN? Must be a slow news day.

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jrockway
I'm glad to say that I don't use facebook enough to care what grammar it uses.

