This is just begging for malicious compliance.
You want to eliminate an entire part of speech? Then good luck trying to understand what the fuck my email is trying to say.
It says email signatures.
And good; it’s ridiculous, virtue-signalling bullshit and you’ve got to let it go.
It’s useful for people with unisex names like Taylor, Chris, or Jordan, especially in email, where you may not have any face-to-face contact.
Or for people with names from cultures not associated with English naming standards such as Chinese or Indian cultures working in western companies or governments.
Pop quiz anti-pronouners! 星辰 Xīng Chén, girl or boy? 美莉 Měi Lì, girl or boy?? Would you like to buy a pronoun now?
The first is male, the second is female, but I study Chinese so that’s not very fair of me.
Yes, that’s a reasonable position.
How does this hold up against a first amendment test?
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Because their employer is the US Government. The very entity the 1st Amendment protects us from.
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Most of that isn’t political speech. You absolutely still have the right to political speech as a government employee. Even the military was forced to let soldiers have political speech. The dividing line is where it looks like the speech is from the government instead of from you. Personal pronouns are hardly going to be from the government.
In your assertion the government could simply remove the rights of civil servants by issuing a policy. And that’s just not how rights work.
Think it is important for people to remove all pronouns from documents. Without, people will be more free to interpret what these messages mean to. This type of malicious compliance will only go so far, sadly.
Comment used it, these, and this. Please remove offensive pronouns, children may be present and children must not learn the english language
children must not learn the english language
Reminds me of…
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
I’ve said it before, I remember reading this novel as a teen and finding the parts about language to be boring and far-fetched.
Looking back, it was probably one of the most important things that Orwell discussed. That shit is incredibly powerful, and it fundamentally shapes how we think and view the world without us even realizing it.
I remember reading Thomas Paine in high school and most of the students couldn’t even understand it. That stuff was printed for the average bloke 200 years ago. The stuff that helped light the American populace to take up arms and overthrow tyrannical rule isn’t even comprehendible to our poorly educated populace now. Being a genius isn’t required to foment revolution, but common language is, literally and figuratively.
If you haven’t learned vocabulary, your brain struggles to conceive, identify and of course use it in course of thought. One of the reasons right wing news and cable so often misuses and deliberately butchers important words like traitor, fascist, etc. is they want to strip them of their very important meaning so they aren’t notable when used.
Oh no what a shame
