Re: [PATCH] CodingGuidelines: recommend gender-neutral description

Derrick Stolee wrote:

On 7/15/2021 12:35 PM, Eric Sunshine wrote:

quoted

On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 12:25 PM Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

diff --git a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines

@@ -541,6 +541,49 @@ Writing Documentation:
+      A contributor asks their upstream to pull from them.
+
+    Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to those who
+    learned English as a second language in some parts of the world.

It also sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to this native English speaker.

A way to adapt this idea more generally would be to pull a phrase
from my commit message in v3:

  Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to readers
  who learned English in a way that dictated "they" as always plural.

Learning English as a second language is one example of how one could
find it ungrammatical. We could call it out explicitly:

  Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to readers
  who learned English in a way that dictated "they" as always plural,
  especially those who learned English as a second language.

This is loaded language. You are inserting your opinion into the text.

Don't. The guidelines are not a place to win arguments.

  Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to some people.

And it sounds ungrammatical because it *is* ungramatical, not only to
native English speakers, but professional linguists.

-- 
Felipe Contreras