zlacker

>>GavCo+(OP)
Here's a good list of changes. Most are about removing any references to ugly or fat. But also other strange things like changing the author's Matilda likes to read to include Jane Austin and John Steinbeck, not calling people crazy, swapping screeching to annoying, removing brothers and sisters to favor "siblings" and using "folks" instead of "ladies and gentlemen"

https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1626860237104857089

>>bko+h5
Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling wrote favorably about colonialism; they were replaced with more agreeable authors.

Use of gendered language is marginalizing to nonbinary people.

It's easy to figure out why these changes are being made in particular, once you take a position of empathy.

>>bitwiz+IM
> Use of gendered language is marginalizing to nonbinary people.

References to brothers or sisters, or mothers or fathers, is offensive to nonbinary people? In all seriousness, not trying to start a flame war, why is that? Is a reference to hair offensive to a bald person?

>>babysh+6N
Offensive is probably too strong a word.

The reason to replace an aggregate ‘brothers and sisters’ with ‘siblings’, ‘mothers and fathers’ with ‘parents’, or ‘boys and girls’ with ‘children’ is because for all of these the replacement suffices without calling attention to gender when it’s not necessary to do so.

There’s also an argument that the ‘X and Y’ phrasing makes the ‘X’ seem more important than the ‘Y’, or makes it seem like the ‘default’ - just a little, but with repetition the impression is reinforced. If there’s an alternative collective word to use, it avoids this ‘ordering’ issue with no real downside.

Note that all these arguments make sense in even if you consider gender to be a binary thing.

>>jrmg+MT
No, it’s not the same thing. Parents it’s plural of parent, “10 fathers” are “10 parents”, so are “10 mothers”. When you want to convey the important point that it’s both mothers and fathers, there is no alternative. Similarly for everything else.

Regarding the first occurrence being conceived as more important, it’s the reason usually females appear named first, a sign of courtesy to them. That was sorted out neatly long ago.

>>neverr+731
I think you’re assuming some sort of extreme militancy about non-gendered language that I don’t have.

Yes, of course you’d need to be specific if it was important. I’d use ‘10 parents’ only if it wasn’t important.

Your example isn’t great though. Even if you assume binary gender for all parents in the group, you couldn’t replace ‘10 parents’ with ‘10 mothers and fathers’ because it’s unclear whether there are 20 people or 10. You’d need to be specific (‘6 mothers and 4 fathers’ or the like).

I don’t think your second paragraph refutes mine at all. I obviously don’t agree that it was ‘sorted out neatly long ago’. You could assume that from the fact that I’ve rethought my own behavior. This world would be a much worse place than it is if people never reconsidered whether the status quo from long ago was optimal.

[Edit: I see now that this comment was not on the same branch as the one where I said I’d rethought my own behavior from a default of e.g. ‘boys and girls’ to ‘children’, so I take back the sentence about you not seeing that. The rest stands though.]