[cumbria_lug] RE: Hello, RE: Location

[trevor at haven.demon.co.uk]

All,
Well I have been busy and not posting for some time, I notice nobody responded to Rob's offer, Rob thank you for the offer I would travel to far-flung Whitehaven for a 'formal' meeting and Carlisle for a social one, I would even go down to Barrow for  a meeting if one was to occur down there.


Rob>Hi Schwuk

>I have a room with 10 PC network in Tangier Street Whitehaven.
>???

>Rob


Martin>Hi guys,

>I've just subscribed to the mailing list. I'm from Carlisle and I hope 
>to enjoy keeping in touch with the mailing list and maybe even venture 
>out to some meetups.

>Considering I feel it would be a waste of a post just to say hello, 
>I'll ask what distro people are using currently.

Martin,
Hello, welcome to the hotbed of Cumbria linux user group.  This week I am using Fedora Core 1, SuSE,Red Hat 9 and Mandrake 9.1. I look forward to meeting you. Is there any subject you would like to present or would like to know more about?  

Previous suggestions include command line tools, office apps and sys-admin. 

Jen>I think the political correctness is misplaced here - "a subject that he knows 
Jen>about" is entirely accurate. I know nothing :-)

Jen>hugs,

Jen>Jen

Jen, Everybody knows that nobody knows nothing , everybody knows something and nobody knows everything, just ask anybody.
     
<Soapbox>
However I think political correctness is rubbish. I don't think writing 'he' as a
Personal pronoun is intended to exclude women we don't have a 'generic genderless personal pronoun' except 'they' e.g. "a subject they know about" however 'they' is also used in a plural context "They are coming" and thus can be seen to be confusing in some cases.

Writing needs to be meaningful, concise and accurate within the bounds of language and this means conveying the intent of the writer. If I were writing and used 'he' as a personal pronoun in the context of a mixed gender group, would you read that I intended the referenced subject to be male and was excluding female members of the group?  This is not my understanding of the common use of English.  I have no objection to the use of 'she' and I have seen many examples of the replacement of 'he' with 'she' I find this is more of a statement about the 'political correctness' of the author than anything else.  It certainly does not add clarity or, in all cases I am aware of, serve a useful function.

When reading we have a well understood tradition of 'he' being a genderless reference to a person.  Explicitly stating this is assuming that either  the  reader is ignorant of the common use of the language or the author is sexist.  Which is in itself politically incorrect.   
</soapbox>

Trevor Pearson,   trevor (a) haven.demon.co.uk