English may be a hot mess but at least we don't have to worry about this nonsense - eviltoast
  • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    Just wait to learn how we gender “dick” and “cunt” in French (hint: it’s not the way you’d think).

    It’s the one thing people who aren’t fluent in a gendered language usually fail to grasp: Grammatical gender is in most situations completely separate from social gender. The grammatical gender in “une bite” has absolutely no social function and is not in any way contradictory to its traditionally opposite social gender.

    Ironically it’s also why using the wrong grammatical gender feels so wrong/unnatural to a native speaker (not that it’s an excuse to be a dick to non-native speakers ofc): gender is not just “a social concept attached to a word”, it is an inherent property of the word that matters fundamentally to sentence structure and so misusing it throws everything off-balance. Francophones will much sooner accept someone close to them being trans than baguettes being male, and this is not a hyperbole.