The more I think about all of this, the more rude I find even using pronouns instead of their name in general… are there certain sayings in English that generally require defaulting to pronouns? I am having a hard time coming up with many.
(Yes I am aware of the fact I used a pronoun to type this, but it’s not directed to a specific audience)
Generally speaking, it’s awkward in English (or even weird) to constantly use the Proper Noun every single time you refer to a person.
Simplest example is “Jim got into his car”. “Jim got into Jim’s car” is strange. And that’s within a single sentence. Properly in English, we use gendered pronouns for all unambiguous references to a person several sentences in a row. For example:
“Jim got into his car. He turned it on, and hit the gas. When he saw a red light, he stopped quickly. Jim got impatient, and honked on the horn”. That would be entirely proper, and virtually none of those pronouns should be replaced with Jim’s proper name.
Thank you. This explained how pronouns would be used, at first I always imagined you would be taking to “jim”, bur after reading I could see where you may be telling a story about “Jim” to others as a third party. I know that sounds dumb, but I never claimed to be smart.
I appreciate you taking the effort to comment instead of just downvoting like some others.
Not a problem. People don’t usually think about pronouns. We could circumvent a lot of confusion if there were an agreeable gender-neutral pronoun in English… But people have gone back and forth about the only one we have (“they”) enough that it rubs both sides wrong. Gendering a person in a sentence rarely disambiguates… it only maters if you have a conversation with exactly 1 male and female subject and ZERO genderable objects.
A man and a woman sitting in a boat, for example, and “her” still might be ambiguous.
The more I think about all of this, the more rude I find even using pronouns instead of their name in general… are there certain sayings in English that generally require defaulting to pronouns? I am having a hard time coming up with many.
(Yes I am aware of the fact I used a pronoun to type this, but it’s not directed to a specific audience)
Generally speaking, it’s awkward in English (or even weird) to constantly use the Proper Noun every single time you refer to a person.
Simplest example is “Jim got into his car”. “Jim got into Jim’s car” is strange. And that’s within a single sentence. Properly in English, we use gendered pronouns for all unambiguous references to a person several sentences in a row. For example:
“Jim got into his car. He turned it on, and hit the gas. When he saw a red light, he stopped quickly. Jim got impatient, and honked on the horn”. That would be entirely proper, and virtually none of those pronouns should be replaced with Jim’s proper name.
Thank you. This explained how pronouns would be used, at first I always imagined you would be taking to “jim”, bur after reading I could see where you may be telling a story about “Jim” to others as a third party. I know that sounds dumb, but I never claimed to be smart.
I appreciate you taking the effort to comment instead of just downvoting like some others.
Not a problem. People don’t usually think about pronouns. We could circumvent a lot of confusion if there were an agreeable gender-neutral pronoun in English… But people have gone back and forth about the only one we have (“they”) enough that it rubs both sides wrong. Gendering a person in a sentence rarely disambiguates… it only maters if you have a conversation with exactly 1 male and female subject and ZERO genderable objects.
A man and a woman sitting in a boat, for example, and “her” still might be ambiguous.