@yclept8 / flickr

Recasting Gendered Pronouns

A necessary thing that can be done without breaking English.

Background: if you have not already read The Power of a Pronoun, please go do so.

The short version: in a piece of publicly-available technical documentation, engineer Isaac Schlueter changed several instances of “he” to “they,” removing gender from the sentence but doing so in a way that hurts my soul.*

Core committer Ben Noordhuis, who is not-repeat-not a misogynistic bastard but has been cast in the unfortunate role of villain in this story, reverted the change. Not because of sexism or correct English, but because of a point of Parliamentary procedure: while Isaac had technical permission to make changes to the product, he did so without review. Shortly afterwards the other core committer approved the change and asked people to cool down for a bit ... but then the Internet stepped in and the crap hit the fan, culminating with Joyent's post, linked above.

Meanwhile, back in the topic at hand, here’s the original language:

Only free when there was no error. On error, we touch up write_queue_size right before making the callback. The reason we don't do that right away is that a write_queue_size > 0 is our only way to signal to the user that he should stop writing - which he should if we got an error.

So we're clear: I agree that this poor mangled thing should be fixed, but for reasons of clarity first.** It's an example of laziness—or unfamiliarity with English—on the part of the original author and needs to be melted down and recast.

Here's one of many ways to tighten it up and eliminate the gendered pronoun:

If an error occurs, wait until we're ready to make the callback instead of freeing memory now. The user needs to see an error signifying that writing should stop, because write_queue_size exceeds zero.

Three steps towards clarity:

1. Go after passive-voice and other filtering mechanisms. In this case I searched out and destroyed all forms of the verb "to be."
2. If you absolutely must write from the first person or frame the concept in we-versus-they language, minimize it. Here I removed all but one occurrence of “we” and “our,” and sneakily combined the only one left with the only remaining passive-voice construction.
3. Watch out for colloquialisms, which often hide flabby language. In this case I replaced “touch up” and “got,” which are both ambiguous to non-native English speakers and can inject even more filtration.

—

* I'm not the only one; millions of people who came of age in the US before 1980 and almost everybody who didn’t hail from the US are trained to never, ever use plural pronouns for singular subjects. We feel actual physical pain—sometimes in the heart, sometimes in the eye, sometimes in the back of our writing hand—when we see them in print.

** I agree with everything that’s been said about how gendered pronouns in non-literary prose are evil and sexist and must be destroyed. They wouldn’t be necessary if we weren’t so damn lazy.