But oh man is it infuriating when the Pebble shows me a spam message, for some reason it evokes hate against the spamming company to a much larger the degree than it does on my phone. I'm much more selective about what app can have notification on the Pebble. It's strange, the smartwatch just feel closer to me and it feels like people mess with me when "they use it" to disturb me for useless things.
Sorry, not really a point in this comment but it felt significant to the point of the website.
Use the singular 'they' instead. If you find that too grammatically egregious to be borne (as I do), alternate masculine and feminine pronouns (as I do). Or default to the feminine pronoun except when speaking specifically of someone male. Or default to the grammatical, if presently unfashionable, collective use of masculine pronouns. Just, seriously, do something that doesn't entail referring to a human as 'it'.
I.e. I want to be able to check a list of not-important but informative notifications once or twice a day, and a couple of apps I want it to buzz and let me know immediately.
As it stands right now, I allow more apps to buzz and get my attention with their notifications than I'd prefer, all because I don't want to miss that information entirely.
I am getting a Pebble2 watch soon, though, so I'm hoping I can use that as my 'priority' notification filter, and turn off the buzzing on my phone.
I get call rings, txt message notifications, and almost nothing else until the Priority only mode expires.
Then you've bought into the bizarre, quixotic, and increasingly-being-rejected effort by Victorian elites to try to pretend that English is some strange constructed Latinate language and not, well, English.
And you should give up.
OTOH, if you really need to refer to a gender neutral abstract person in English, and really can't bring yourself to use "they", learn to use "one" properly. This can require restructuring sentence and not just dropping a different pronoun in, e.g., this:
the human should have total control over "how important" a given technology is to it.
one should have total control over "how important" a given technology is to oneself.I'd be curious to see this perspective detailed at greater length.
I get that objectification and dehumanization have been and continue to be huge problems, I just don't see an issue here. If you're talking about a specific person, it's weird and possibly offensive, but that's not the case here.
Others seem to. It may be worth taking their perspective into account along with your own. But that's your consideration to make.
I do try to avoid basing arguments on the concept of offense, because there seem to be a lot of people for whom that is a red flag that terminates the possibility of further meaningful discussion, and also because I have some qualms of my own around the way it's used in modern discourse.
I nonetheless feel I should apologize for having, apparently without justice, taken you to be such a person, and felt it necessary as a result to argue with more care, and more circumlocution, than the situation apparently required. I'm sorry for that. Thanks for not being that guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Trend_to_prescri...
Of course, the German version catches flak for being too close to "man" (Mann), and is sometimes replaced with frau (Frau meaning "woman"). So it goes.