Re: [OT] Re: [PATCH] protect migration/%d etc from sched_setaffinity

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org> 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