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Anyway, bravo Google. It's a win for privacy rights in social media, and it's a win for gender identity rights.
Grammar problem fixed.
@10, uhhhh, no. See @3 regarding language accomodating change. I know it's a craaaazy concept, but the world does not stop evolving because you decide certain ideas are perfect.
Saying he/him is gender neutral... and then backing it up with a Wikifreakingpedia article that says it hasn't been a universal pronoun since the 1960s is definitely troll, Mr. Trolly McTrollerman, son of Trolalfson Trollerstein.
I award you your Trollbiscuit and bid you run along now.
You don't know what exactly grammar is, do you?
Not-very-smart, narrow-minded, insecure people fixate on grammar nuances. The best part is when they argue over it because it confirms just how dumb they really are (a), and (b), clearly demonstrates their complete misunderstanding about the nature of language.
Eliminate the Pronoun Problem:
Sample Sentence (incorrect):
“He thinks his Ivytalk page is useful”
Rephrase the sentence to eliminate the pronoun:
“Customers think Ivytalk pages are useful “
Use the singular “They” or plural “Their”:
“They think their Ivytalk page is useful”
Reference:
Miller, Casey. & Kate Swift. "The Pronoun Problem."Â The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing. New York: Harper, 1988. 43-58
It can be more difficult to be grammatically correct, genuinely gender-neutral and non-clunky, but it is possible. Why shouldn't we try?
In short, it was grammatical in the past, it continues to be grammatical today, and exists for good reasons even apart from gender neutrality.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?ca…
http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/20…
Rest assured that, in my paid professional writing for corporate America, I am resolutely politically correct and do use such alternative constructions (although I would even resort to "his or her" before "their"). But in my informal, social writing, I make up for it by striving to be as polically incorrect as possible.
Would you also say "They is standing at the door"? And believe it is gramatically proper? Perhaps you would, but most would not, even among those who use the "their" construction.
Linguistics may be about use, but grammar is about rigid, abstract structures. If "they" is really the third person pronoun of indeterminate gender, my example sentence is correct. That most do not recognize it as such indicates that the "their" construction is merely a colloquialism, not a new rule of grammar.
Grammar doesn't give a shit if you refer to a man as "her" as long as you put it in the right spot in the sentence (e.g., as the object rather than as the subject). Usage is about the nuance of word choice. This is a usage issue.
yup. zzzzzzzz.
Oh, they do document uses and voice support for "their" constructions, consistent with the usual linquist badge-of-honor preference for description of what is used over what they derisively call "prescriptivist" rules about what is correct.
But what we have here is precisely a question about what is correct, and on that count they are much more willing to grant the questionability of "their" constructions that you are. Here are some quotes from their posts:
(I love that the writer of that last is so toubled with the idea of wrong usage might be wrong that he has to put "wrong" in scare quotes.)