So we’ve got this Ask Peter thing, where you ask me a question, and I get to answer it in a blog post. It’s pretty awesome stuff.

In this case, I get to answer three questions. What a lucky person I am.

Let’s get right on with it. Here’s the first question, from Luke:

Luke

What is your opinion on using “they” as a third person singular gender-neutral pronoun?

Personally, I’ve always felt the need for a third person singular gender-neutral pronoun, but not for the reason you’d think. I don’t often run into situations where I need to refer to someone of unknown gender or someone sentient of no gender (think robots), but I do run into situations where I want to describe someone of a gender without giving away his or her gender.

Now, I realized I just used “his or her” and I approve of this for text, but it’s rather clumsy to say the same in vocal speech. They seems acceptable; although you could make up a new word for it such as the infamous “Hir”, which is annoyingly hard to pronounce correctly and make distinguish its meaning at the same time.

Another problem is that you can’t just default to “him” — while it may be sexist, the problem is far more in the confusion of assuming a gender to something that’s gender-neutral, which is the opposite of what you want to be communicating.

But apparently the singular they, while the bane of many English teachers, has been in public use since before the 15th century. See the relevant Wikipedia article for continuation on this topic.

But for now, I’m in favour of it, and I’m sure they are too.

Austin

There has been recent reports of ever more Robotic “defects” detected in train systems, first a computerized train slowly crept up on a worker and killed him, and another subway train crashed into another train when it was on auto-pilot.

What the hell is going on?!

Well, Austin, the only reasonable explanation I can come up with has a lot more in common with the plot to the 1986 sci-fi movie Short Circuit than mechanical glitches. The documented reports are both here and here, and state similar stories:

An unmanned, computerized train slowly rolled forward onto a repairman, who unfortunately did not survive. Authorities haven’t come to a conclusion, saying it rolled for “unknown reasons”

and

Police say a Metromover car rolled over and killed a station supervisor as he inspected the tracks.

The accident happened Saturday. The computerized vehicle, which is not driven by a conductor, was stopped, but moved forward for an unknown reason.

If the robots really are coming for us and attempting to kill us through supposed malfunctions, maybe the ghosts in the machine are true and will be the death of us all. Or you could just believe that it was a glitch probably caused by electrical irregularities, but that’s just the kind of thing they want you to think.

All I can offer is that I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. Also some bonus content — documentation of the first death at the hands of a automated soon-to-be-overlord.

Jeff

Nothing like a good ghost story, eh? I remember you used to have a few, and I’m collecting a bunch of weird things for an ongoing project of mine. Wanna share a few? I’ll credit them to here if you want.

Hey Jeff — I don’t have any ghost stories immediately on hand anymore, but I may have a book or two in my room that I can look for. I think I used to have ghost stories that I wrote on my own, but they’re long gone — lost on a desktop computer that I doubt not even the Flying Spaghetti Monster could locate.

What I can find is this — an expansive “preview” of the book that I do own somewhere and had since early childhood (which probably explains the reason I am the way I am) via Google Books and a website I found by Google searching and contains stories that I didn’t bother to read before putting the link on my website.

I’m not sure if that helps, but I’ll tell you if I ever find anything else.

Be Sociable, Share!

•