The Gaming Den

Koumei wrote:Which is the correct one to use in English when referring to a specific sentient creature (as opposed to "If anyone enters the area, he or she must Save vs Fiery Doom) that is neither male or female? Do you use "it" or does English default to male in these cases?

Traditionalists will say "he". If you are writing a paper for a university professor, this is probably the way to go.
( Of course the last fucker I got into a game-related gender-pronoun argument with helpfully citied AD&D 2nd edition as their reasoning for this usage. And I think I've made my feelings clear that whatever the subject, NOT doing it the way 2e did is an improvement.)

People trying to actually sell their game product to a mass market tend to use "he or she" or occasionally "they". If you are writing commercially, this is usually the way to go.

People trying to sell their game to insecure teenage boys will use "she". If you are writing for White Wolf, you must do this.
( I think I've also made my feelings clear about White Wolf's editorial quality. See page XX for details. )

I would personally rewrite it as either the safe "Anyone entering the area must Save vs Fiery Doom" unless the style guide let me use the 2nd person to get away with "if you enter the area, you must save vs fiery doom". Both of those are gender-neutral, grammatically correct English without either screaming "Hey lookie here, see this I'm using gender neutral language! Arn I not just so progressive with it!?"

IMX, most of the people trying to prescriptively impose new gender-neutral 3rd person language on English usage are saying "I have severe conflict with traditional gender roles as a key part of my identity" and you should probably treat such people as you would treat people who you know to have post-traumatic stress disorder.

nockermensch wrote:

sabs wrote:I'm just glad English isn't a romance language, where certain words are feminine or masculine.. and sometimes.. the choices are just weird.

a knife is masculine, a fork is feminine, a car is feminine, a plane is masculine.

In Portuguese at very least those are almost exactly backwards: Knife is feminine, fork masculine, car masculine and plane masculine. But ship is feminine, and so is airship.

[the_more_you_know.jpg]

Nope, English is a Germanic language, where everything also has a gender. Yay?

English could probably be considered an advanced Pidgin, or something along those lines.

* The Germanic language was peppered with local/Latin changes before the French came over.
* The French taking over really skewed things. Instead of three ehm... gender states (male/female/neutral), people eventually adopted across the board gender-neutral speech to help prevent confusion between local plebes and French rulers/important people that owned/ran things.
* "English" also took on French inflections, phrasing and words. Which is where a lot of our strange inconsistencies come from, especially pertaining to weak and strong endings.
* Once people saw fit to actually start writing down and codifying English, people also began experimenting with it. Which is where a lot of the silly and Hellenic-sounding words come from.


I can't find my book that has the really good examples...

http://www.farcastblog.com/2013/12/365- ... uture.html

And that's the year. 366 entries, 224,065 words.

Thanks for reading! One of the Farcast readers is preparing a spiffy PDF with all the entries properly edited and formatted, but if you just can't wait, I've compiled together a quick & dirty Farcast Ashcan PDF for your enjoyment.
Links:
Scribd, Box.net, GoogleDocs