My guess is that it will remain “they are” and become another irregular construction to fuck with ESL students.
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I’m a tear off the bandaid kinda guy though. They is avoids the trouble of making it clear you’re using the singular they.
Like my friend and NB trans woman was recently elected to public office here and just last week they was/were infront of some panel in Hartford getting NB options put on our census.
Were parses better but doesn’t make it clear I’m talking about one person, was parses kinda bad but if we all get used to it it’s better for everyone.
Anyway, I guess I’ll go with are/were.
To be fair, it does parallel the second-person construction “You are”, so there’s grammatical precedent.
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“You” already conflates singular and plural. It’s always “You are” and never “You is”.
You and They end up being the same construction if you follow the path English has generally taken.
Oh, I was under the impression they was standing in, not for you but for he and she and him and her, and therefore should follow the same rules. No reason for that to be though.
I believe this is a consequence of dropping the original second person singular pronoun in English in favor of the plural form, “you,” to make a pattern that’s similar to the second person formal form that’s prevalent in languages such as the Romance languages.
In all the Romance languages, the second person formal form of “you” is identical (or at least really close to the second person plural form, e.g. Portuguese “você,” French “vous,” Spanish “usted.” Although European Portuguese is a bit of an outlier in that it’s more common to use the equivalents of “sir” or “ma’am” instead of using a formal pronoun (Brazil likes to use “você,” though), e.g. “Would Sir like to order something?” “Ma’am is going to the store.”
English used to have the second person singular pronoun, “thou,” but you’ll only find it in Middle-English era and earlier documents these days.
If you read the article linked from the tweet I posted, it explains all about this.
And I pay the price for being moderately lazy this instance. You live, you learn.
I just read this great quote and wanted to put it here so I’d remember it:
“The plural of anecdote is not data.”
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First forays into Angular, and I couldn’t help myself
import { Hero } from './hero';
export const HEROES: Hero[] = [
{ id: 1, name: 'Saitama' },
{ id: 12, name: 'Genos' },
{ id: 13, name: 'Smileman' },
{ id: 14, name: 'King' },
{ id: 15, name: 'Metal Bat' },
{ id: 16, name: 'Mumen Rider' },
{ id: 17, name: 'Atomic Samurai' },
{ id: 18, name: 'Watchdog Man' },
{ id: 19, name: 'Fang' },
{ id: 20, name: 'Terrible Tornado' },
{ id: 21, name: 'Child Emperor' }
];It’s funny how universal nerd culture is. I’m on a business trip to a very small town in Mississippi, and yesterday a middle aged man told me about the time he almost killed a popular Twitch streamer in PUBG.
My local bar will have less cock on the menu soon.
The old manager did a (mostly) good job translating the menu into into English, but mistranslated ‘coke highball’ as ‘cock highball’. I got a free drink for pointing it out and they got a good laugh out of it.
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What is it with cis comics all having transgender routines now? They’re all one of two bits: the tolerant one and the intolerant one, neither of which are particularly funny or insightful. Maybe it’s cause all the trans comedy is on YouTube which is a place I try to avoid, but I’m just so sick of these two bits being in every Netflix comedy special. The last time I saw a truly original bit on a trans people was Rory Albanese live at the Comedy Connection in Providence, RI. Can’t do it justice in text, tho. If I was a stand up comic, I would have a boatload of material on gender dysphoria, and use none of it cause the god damn cis comics are flooding the market with low quality product.
I got about 9 minutes into that and it was fine but, much like cis people’s trans humor, I feel like I’ve heard it before.
But this is the same with every topic of comedy! If you think trans comedy is already tired, you should hear how many masturbation and porn jokes I’ve got to slog through to ever hear a new take.
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Thing I learned today. All the digital content you own music, movies, books and videogames. Are not transferable when you die. I guess the ‘work around’ to that is to have the login and password available in a note with your will to the person you want to give your digital content to.
Put all usernames, passwords, encryption keys, 2FA backup codes, etc. into a safe place and make sure that someone can get it when you are dead.
I mean, it doesn’t matter too much to you, if you’re dead, but it’s going to save the people still living a lot of headache. So it’s nice to do it out of courtesy.
There will be lawsuits about this. A whole generation of Steam users will die in the coming decades. A court will get to decide if there is a basic right to pass these down as assets.
And you guys wonder why I buy MP3s.