this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
457 points (100.0% liked)
196
18150 readers
642 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
Other rules
Behavior rules:
- No bigotry (transphobia, racism, etc…)
- No genocide denial
- No support for authoritarian behaviour (incl. Tankies)
- No namecalling
- Accounts from lemmygrad.ml, threads.net, or hexbear.net are held to higher standards
- Other things seen as cleary bad
Posting rules:
- No AI generated content (DALL-E etc…)
- No advertisements
- No gore / violence
- Mutual aid posts are not allowed
NSFW: NSFW content is permitted but it must be tagged and have content warnings. Anything that doesn't adhere to this will be removed. Content warnings should be added like: [penis], [explicit description of sex]. Non-sexualized breasts of any gender are not considered inappropriate and therefore do not need to be blurred/tagged.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on our matrix channel or email.
Other 196's:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But “it” is for inanimate objects. “They” is a gender neutral pronoun for living creatures.
Not quite. "It" is a general reference pronoun with a function akin to "the". It can be used to refer to anything that is a thing, even if said thing is animate and/or living.
When referring indiscriminately to a specimen of fauna, "it" is a linguistically appropriate identifier whereas "they" would only really be entirely appropriate when referring to an individual or subset of individuals, regardless of species or animacy.
Since this fish has no distinguishable identity apart from the cultural impact it may spawn, I reckon it's more appropriate to use "it" but "they" could also work.
I am not a linguist. But if you are, feel free to correct me. If you feel like pretending to be a linguist, go talk to an LLM cause IDC.
If you wouldn't call a human being "it", then you shouldn't call a non-human animal "it", either.
I'll call human beings "it" if that's what they prefer!