Since you’re being shit on in this thread, I just wanted to thank you for being so thorough and objective in your responses here, and for your links to sources. We need more people like you on Lemmy.

Excellent post in general, but it should be noted that the meaning of “wine-dark sea” is still very much disputed.

Sekiro has the best combat of any game I’ve ever played, so I’d be satisfied with just having something like it in other FS games.

…entirely in Sony’s hands.

You can very easily decide. 2, 4, and 5 are outlandish and incredibly unlikely, and 3 isn’t newsworthy.

The most likely choice is 1, by an enormous margin, and guess what, that’s exactly which one it was!

Not on lemmy.ml there isn’t!

Just bought $50 of merch off their website – this is the sort of journalism we should all be supporting.

Same. As much as I love Domino’s, if we’re going out, we’re definitely going to a proper pizzeria.

Domino’s pan, double cheese, light sauce, extra pepperoni. I’ve tried deep dish in Chicago, New York style in New York, traditional pizzerias in Italy, and countless overpriced “craft” places from all over North America, and nothing I’ve tried even comes close.

“Does anyone else… (have trouble finishing video games/use their toenail clippings to add texture to a pot of chili/etc.)?”

Since you’re getting blasted here, I just wanted to hop on the downvote train to let you know that I think you’re exactly right on all counts.

Like go ahead and argue for an end to misandristic violence if you’d like.

Nah, I’ll go ahead and argue for an end to all violent crime, and not exclude the victims who aren’t lucky enough to have their gender be the reason they were murdered.

I’ve never understood this prevalent idea that murder victims are only worth caring about if their gender played a role. Like, how horribly fucked-up is it to say that some murder victims are more worthy of concern than others, especially when those victims only comprise a small minority of murders?

Being killed because of your gender and being killed because you were in the wrong place or because you looked like an easy mark are all equally bad reasons to murder someone. They’re also all phenomena that could just as easily be addressed by government programs like in the OP, and yet all we ever hear about is the “violence against women” epidemic that only affects a minority of victims.

Plus, even if the numbers of women murdered for their gender is going up (which is obviously horrible and inexcusable), that number still has a long way to go before it even approaches the much higher number of men who are already being killed every year. Like, of course it’s a horrible thing that the number of murdered women is increasing, but I fail to see how that’s so much more important than the much higher number of men who are already being killed, but that nobody is doing anything about.

I mean, the reason for it is the same as it always is - men are seen as disposable by society and therefore issues affecting them are ignored - it just sucks to constantly be inundated with evidence of just how deeply ingrained this misandry is in our society.

This but unironically. Please, please stop demonizing men and actually think about them for once.

The incredibly tiny proportion of the population who are murderers, I’d assume (less than 1 out of every 10,000 people in the US per year if my math is right).

Both sets of victims are equally dead, of course, just with a much higher percentage of those dead victims being men, and a much smaller percentage of those dead victims being the ones stories like this always seem to focus on.

I betcha ten bucks the number of men violently killed in Australia so far this year is significantly higher, just like it is every year. Weird how I can never find any articles about that though.

Thanks!

It wasn’t a criticism - I was just curious if anyone had any more info.

Do we know when Mint 22 is coming yet other than just “summer '24”?

Sometimes I do so because the gender is irrelevant

This seems to be part of the pathway of change that has led to the widespread adoption of specific singular “they” among younger speakers, and there’s some empirical evidence supporting this.

What I don’t get is, how can knowing the gender suddenly make it difficult to use a neutral term, if it worked before?

This is just one of those arbitrary rules that often exist in language, like how in many languages neuter/inanimate nouns can’t act as the subject of a sentence due to what’s called an “animacy restriction”.

For this specific phenomenon (the “older” ungrammaticality of definite singular they vs. the “younger” grammaticality of it), this recent paper argues that this is due to a difference in obligatoriness of morphosyntactic gender features. The paper is a bit technical if you don’t have a linguistic background, but the basic argument is that in older varieties of English, gender features must be obligatorily expressed in the morphosyntactic derivation if they are known, while in younger varieties, this expression seems to be optional, and therefore free variation between he/they and she/they is allowed by the grammar.

So, “It’s John’s. They need to come get it” is ungrammatical for older speakers for not obligatorily expressing the gender feature once it’s known, while it’s perfectly fine for younger speakers for whom expressing that feature seems to be optional in the grammar.

Maybe this analogy will help: Let’s say you meet someone, and you ask them “Do you have a cat?”. Note that you’ve used the singular here, though it’s acting number-neutral in this context. If they respond “I have two”, then it will immediately become ungrammatical for you to continue to use the number-neutral singular and ask “Does your cat like fish?”

Once you have access to the information that there’s more than one cat, then the arbitrary rules of English grammar require that knowledge to immediately be reflected in the morphosyntactic structure of your sentences from then on. And this makes no independent, logical sense, because there are tons of languages out there that don’t have plurality distinctions. But, English does, and so to speak grammatical English (for now), you have to use plural morphology to refer to more than one entity.

It’s the same for “older” speakers of English - just like it’s ungrammatical for you to continue to use the number-neutral singular once you know that there’s a “plural number feature” in the linguistic context, for older speakers of English it’s ungrammatical for them to continue to use the gender-neutral “they” once they know that there’s a “masculine gender feature” in the linguistic context.

Also, it’s important to note that this term “ungrammatical” is descriptive, not prescriptive - it’s not saying that it’s not “proper” or “correct” according to some arbitrary standard that someone decided on in the 1800s, but rather that’s literally not how those speakers’ mental grammars work. While it may seem illogical (and even regressive from a modern political perspective), every natural human language is composed of arbitrary rules that often seem illogical. Like how the past tense of “go” is the completely unrelated past tense of the older English verb “to wend”, “went”. Or how the past tense of the verb “can” isn’t “could” anymore – that’s reserved for modal usage now in most English dialects – it’s the completely awkward phrase “was able to”.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t, or shouldn’t, try to accommodate non-binary people of course, as is unfortunately often argued, but it does mean that, contrary to what I commonly see people say on the internet, doing so for these speakers does require a constant, concerted effort to consciously override their mental grammars.

What a weird distinction to make that it’s talking about an abstract gendered person rather than concrete. I don’t know why the grammar would make that distinction (nor do I think it does).

Then you’re gonna be absolutely gobsmacked by the other grammatical distinctions that exist across the world’s languages.

It doesn’t matter if you know why the grammar would make that distinction or not - the distinction exists, and is widely accepted in the linguistic literature (as cited above) whether you think it does or not.

The argument that is almost always made is that “they can’t be singular.”

I’m not sure what that has to do with our conversation, since I’ve never made that claim (and neither did Thymos). If that’s what you’re basing your argument on here, then that’s a pretty egregious strawman of my position.

Sure, maybe it historically hasn’t been used for a particular subject, but that’s a fairly minor grammatical shift.

And yet it exists nonetheless, rendering your “correction” of my original comment (and your “correction” of Thymos’s comments in the other thread, for that matter) inaccurate and misleading.

If we’re going to argue that’s wrong because it isn’t historically accepted then we probably need to speak a totally different version of English than we do because it has made much larger shifts than that in the past.

I haven’t argued that anything is “wrong” other than your description of the historical use of English pronouns. Linguistics is descriptive, not normative, which means that the historical facts of English have no bearing whatsoever on what we “probably need” to do.