From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S270851AbTHARet (ORCPT ); Fri, 1 Aug 2003 13:34:49 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S270852AbTHARet (ORCPT ); Fri, 1 Aug 2003 13:34:49 -0400 Received: from ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com ([166.70.28.69]:61235 "EHLO frodo.biederman.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S270851AbTHARer (ORCPT ); Fri, 1 Aug 2003 13:34:47 -0400 To: Jamie Lokier Cc: Robert Love , "J.A. Magallon" , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [OT] Re: [PATCH] protect migration/%d etc from sched_setaffinity References: <20030731224604.GA24887@tsunami.ccur.com> <1059692548.931.329.camel@localhost> <20030731230635.GA7852@rudolph.ccur.com> <1059693499.786.1.camel@localhost> <20030731231850.GC7378@werewolf.able.es> <1059694637.786.11.camel@localhost> <20030801161529.GB12501@mail.jlokier.co.uk> From: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) Date: 01 Aug 2003 11:31:43 -0600 In-Reply-To: <20030801161529.GB12501@mail.jlokier.co.uk> Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Jamie Lokier writes: > Eric W. Biederman wrote: > > > So, since administrators come in both sexes, I picked one. > > > > Except the convention in English is to use the male in that case. > > Using the female pronoun tends to distract from the point. > As you can see from the latter two examples, a word _itself_ does not > imply a linguistic sex. The role is what is significant. To some extent. To some extent before people started ``correcting'' the situation the masculine pronoun was on it's way to becoming gender neutral in English. In a similar case sir has become vendor neutral in some contexts. I need to review what has actually happened in the armed services to see if a vendor neutral usage has caught on at large. But it is encouraging to see that things like this can happen. > Many people don't like the stereotyping, and the (significant) social > inequality which is reinforced by this, and choose to do their bit to > alter (possibly correct) the collective view of how things are, or > ought to be. Same here. > You're right that it distracts from the point, but then to _not_ > distract from the point is to perpetuate social inequality, or > something like that... It lowers my opinion of someone when they do not want to perpetuate stereo types and yet cannot rephrase a sentence in a gender neutral way, in English. > > There are plenty of plural forms that do not imply gender at all. > > As in: > > > > > Yah, I know. But this is a lot of code just to prevent root users from > hanging > > > > themselves, and there are plenty of other ways they can do that. > > That is the most neutral. Alas, plurals are often that bit more > cumbersome and dry. Depends whether you're evoking a reference manual > or a personal story, I guess :) So brining this back on topic. Given that plurals are gender neutral, and that there are gender neutral words like person and people. When doing kernel documentation please do it in a gender neutral way. Eric