Mastodawn

Hey @gproenca, thanks for the follow request! Unfortunately there's not enough vibe on your profile to check, so...

You must choose one highly-specific, and utterly trivial hill you're totally willing to die on. What is it?

(if you already have one, you may share it instead of choosing a new one)

For me, it's use of the term "guys" for groups that aren't all guys. I've found myself more and more annoyed the more I talk about it. Now, I'm like at the point that I'm railing against the default-masculinity of language to random strangers at the grocery store! Also, it's not trivial! Language is important—it shapes our perceptions! How many guys have you slept with, huh? Huh??

@alice I have long looked forward to the captcha that leaves me unable to keep my mouth shut.

The lack of a common “xor” in conversational English is a glaring deficiency that bothers me. You can kind of use “and/or” to explicitly mean an “inclusive or”, and most people will understand that. But far fewer will use it that way. In general you can kind of mostly infer if an or is supposed to inclusive or exclusive. But there’s just enough ambiguity to bother me.

We should fix the English language, in a lot of ways actually, but this is the one that annoys me personally and deeply, and this is a hill I will die on.

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Tonya Marie 🏳️‍⚧️

@NineIsntPrime @alice My wife (the English composition major and writer/editor) and I (the Math major and computer/database person) often come to (verbal and mostly good-natured (mostly)) blows about this. Many places she assumes an exclusive OR when it isn't absolutely required by context, whereas I assume inclusive OR.