Maybe also worth mentioning: In the English language the plural "they" is sometimes (often?) used in modern times to replace the singular "he" and "she" when the gender is unknown or doesn't perfectly fit. Yeah, all that equal rights and LQBT* stuff can get complicated and certainly has an effect on language.

* or whatever the acronym is this week. That, too, seems to get more complicated all the time.

It sounds weird at first, but it makes writing and reading stuff on the internet a lot easier and prevents accidentally offending someone. Instead of having to write "he/she" or "(s)he", just use "they". So, for example, it would be "LanX wrote a post. They said...". Which has the benefit of not having to virtually stalk LanX to find out what gender (if any) LanX feels like having today.

As a side note: This would probably have confused Shakespeare less then you'd think. All their actors were male because of the culture of the time. So, technically, Romeo and Juliet, one of the most well known romance if theater history, were both dudes (probably, who knows), one of them wearing female clothes, and you would have to switch gender when talking about them, depending on their stage character or their person.

> This would probably have confused Shakespeare less then you'd think.

Even less than you think. Singular they says:

The singular they emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they.

map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]

Oh wow. I stand corrected.

And that, children, is what happens if you rely on your own faulty memory instead of looking it up on the internet.

perl -e 'use Crypt::Digest::SHA256 qw[sha256_hex]; print substr(sha256_hex("the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything"), 6, 2), "\n";'

> find out what gender (if any) LanX feels like having today.

Some documents still say Lana, but I'll have them rewritten soon.

Cheers Lance
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}