[Pan-users] Re: updated info

[Duncan]

walt posted on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:43:04 -0700 as excerpted:

> On 08/03/2010 02:31 AM, Duncan wrote:
> 
>> K Haley's the most obvious candidate given his community repo...
> 
> Heh, interesting how perceptions differ in cyberspace.  Ordinarily I
> wouldn't even mention this, but I've had a few glasses of wine and my
> good judgement is obviously impaired.
> 
> AFAICR, K. has never given us a gender clue

Well, as regulars surely know by now, the list doesn't always stay on 
topic.  Of course, it might be different and we'd need to be a bit more 
strict with it if pan was under fast-paced development (like the year-plus 
it was getting a release every week or two), but given the pace of things 
lately, a bit of diversion now and then keeps the locals (of which I'm 
definitely one) entertained, I guess!

Anyway, while I'm aware of the "singular they" pronoun when gender isn't 
known, just as languages such as Spanish have gendered nouns (like say 
table, house, door, or bus) that don't really have anything to do with 
gender per say, and AFAIK generally uses the masculine/-o form as opposed 
to the feminine/-a form for individuals or groups of people where the 
gender is unknown or mixed, English has (at least regionally, and I think 
in general) traditionally used gendered pronouns with similar rules: 
masculine when referring to individuals or groups of people of unknown or 
mixed gender, and feminine when anthropomorphizing inanimate objects.  For 
instance, hurricanes were traditionally christened with female names, tho 
male names are often used now, and boats, cars, etc, are more often 
referred to as "her" than "him", illustrating the female human-
characterizing of inanimate objects, and correspondingly from the human 
reference side, "mankind" and "humankind" are general synonyms, while 
"womankind" refers to human females specifically.

So that's simply what I was doing here.  "He" is used in the gender-
unspecified individual human being sense, not in the gender specified 
masculine human being sense.

That said, I suppose partly because the FLOSS coding community is 
comparatively devoid of female presence, I do tend to assume male unless 
there's reason to believe otherwise.

Looking at the whole thing from a different angle, nursing used to be a 
male dominated profession in which women weren't accepted, and women who 
went into it were considered strange, at minimum (gays/lesbians weren't 
accepted at all in those days, and a female nurse's sexuality was 
suspect).  How that changed, tho well before me, as at least since I've 
been around, the profession has been so overwhelmingly female that "male 
nurse" is often used when one is specifically referring to a guy, to 
prevent the otherwise female assumption.  Could/will that some day happen 
to computer coding?  I don't know.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman