Re: [PATCH] CodingGuidelines: recommend gender-neutral description

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

Derrick Stolee wrote:
> On 7/15/2021 12:35 PM, Eric Sunshine wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 12:25 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> >> diff --git a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines
> >> @@ -541,6 +541,49 @@ Writing Documentation:
> >> +      A contributor asks their upstream to pull from them.
> >> +
> >> +    Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to those who
> >> +    learned English as a second language in some parts of the world.
> > 
> > It also sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to this native English speaker.
> 
> A way to adapt this idea more generally would be to pull a phrase
> from my commit message in v3:
> 
>   Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to readers
>   who learned English in a way that dictated "they" as always plural.
> 
> Learning English as a second language is one example of how one could
> find it ungrammatical. We could call it out explicitly:
> 
>   Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to readers
>   who learned English in a way that dictated "they" as always plural,
>   especially those who learned English as a second language.

This is loaded language. You are inserting your opinion into the text.

Don't. The guidelines are not a place to win arguments.

  Note that this sounds ungrammatical and unnatural to some people.

And it sounds ungrammatical because it *is* ungramatical, not only to
native English speakers, but professional linguists.

-- 
Felipe Contreras