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Thread: Gender Neutral Titles
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2021-01-01, 07:38 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2005
Grammatical Gender
That may be assumed by some people sometimes, but certainly not always by everyone. I'm pretty sure that studies have shown that masculine pronouns are generally thought to refer to men and boys whether the subject is known or not. It would be surprising if that were not the case. This is common usage.
And if you do want to get technical about it, isn't "it" the third-person neuter singular in English? One can insist on that, I suppose, if one attaches enough significance to the distinction between singular and plural, in which case one should also be using "thou" and "thee". A bit odd to do to maintain a faux singular, though. There "they" feels a lot more natural.
(E.g. in the sentence "Everyone put on his hat", "his" doesn't refer to only one person, despite being singular grammatically. Indeed, the function of "each" or "every" is to indicate that the singular is being used for the multiple, although that can happen in other cases, e.g. "when a doctor treats his patient". There's probably some fancy technical term for the faux singular that I don't know. Anyway, my recollection is that this sort of use of singular pronouns and nouns to refer to multiple entities seems to have been the primary original context in which the "singular they" understandably came into use, before going on to be applied more broadly.)
But we were talking about nouns, not pronouns.
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2021-01-06, 08:36 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2020
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2021-01-08, 02:48 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2020
- Location
- Area 51
Re: Gender Neutral Titles
Regent, Ruler, Vizier, Magistrate, Blooded, Clerist, Cleric, Sifu, Sensei, Archmage, Dominus (?), Imperitor, Centurion, Village Elder, Captain, Doctor (?), Officer, CEO..
most languages are gendered and thus have male/female words for leadership roles, but some terms are culturally neutral.
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2021-01-08, 02:53 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2020
- Location
- Area 51
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2021-01-15, 01:14 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Apr 2019
- Location
- Somewhere over th rainbow
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2021-02-09, 12:52 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2020
Re: Gender Neutral Titles
You could go with "Trooper" or "Soldier." The US Military continues to use "Rifleman" and "Seaman" and other gendered titles because it does not traditionally indicate gender but a skillset or duty assignment. Alternatively, my leaders came up with a number of creative titles for their troops that were neither gender nor rank based.