Is there any books that use 'they', 'them' and 'theirs' instead of 'he', 'she', 'him', 'her', 'his' and 'hers'?
I wanna see what genders people happen to assign the characters.
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Anonymous2009-12-14 16:34
Not that I know of...but you know what they say, if you want to read a book and can't find it...write it.
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Anonymous2009-12-15 12:40
Not OP, but it's funny, I actually have a story I'm working on where the gender and name of the narrator are never given. It's actually pretty hard to do and keep it still feeling natural. I would be pretty surprised if someone has actually written an entire book using only gender neutral pronouns and references for all or most of the characters.
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Anonymous2009-12-15 12:41
Not OP, but it's funny, I actually have a story I'm working on where the gender and name of the narrator are never given. It's actually pretty hard to do and keep it still feeling natural. I would be pretty surprised if someone has actually written an entire book using only gender neutral pronouns and references for all or most of the characters.
Argh... I can't remember the book, but it was all written in first-person, and you can't tell until the very end what sex the character was. 'I', 'me', and 'my' don't have genders.
There's also Left Hand of Darkness by LeGuinn. That's about sex changes, sort of. I didn't like it, though.
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Anonymous2009-12-15 15:42
hard to search for something like that, best i could come up with is look through Gender-neutrality in literature results, or something similar
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Anonymous2009-12-16 1:33
>>1
I thought "they" was only to be used for more than one person.
Wouldn't using "him/her", while awkward, be grammatically correct?
It's also worth mentioning that using "him/her" isn't really preferred either. The best solution is just to reword the sentence so you're not using any pronouns at all.
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Anonymous2009-12-16 13:09
Using "they" as a singular pronoun is an abomination.
Every time you do it you are making yourself look like an uneducated American who likes to suck on fat hairy feminists' clits.
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Anonymous2009-12-16 13:19
>>11
Forsooth Sirrah, if it doth be good enow for Shakspear then verily do I declare it good enow for mine own self.
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend
Does anything make a person look dumber than complaining about well-established parts of their language as if they were new?
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Anonymous2009-12-16 21:28
What was an oddity against the background of generally using singular correctly cannot be made a convincing argument for widespread and continual abuse of the plural that happens now. Exactly what do you think you're gaining by dropping carefully selected passages in a corpus of English Lit where the overall correct usage is clear?
>>16
No, as little as I can manage, in fact. And what do I have to learn from talking to most people? From fucking idiots that can't go a single sentence without saying "got" or some other illiterate word choice?
"I got up. I got some breakfast. When I got to school, I got in my chair. Got. Got. Got." Fucking subhumans. All their bleatings sound the same to me.
I spend my free time reading well-written books, like most 4channers that would actually click on a link to the /Book/ textboard.
Well when i was reading "To Kill a Mocking Bird" -Harper Lee I had this problem and originally mistook Scout for a boy.
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Anonymous2009-12-17 13:08
>>14
Out of millions of lines of written English, you have found an anomaly where an established writer makes a poor grammatical choice, congratulations. All it proves is Shakespeare was human, and you are an idiot.
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Anonymous2009-12-17 14:40
BAWWWWW
the masses define and create grammar and definitions. trying to suggest that they are static is ridiculous.
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Anonymous2009-12-17 15:10
>>22
Dis nigga be right, all dat mattaz is da masses speaks it, so dats be da good gramma
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Anonymous2009-12-17 15:10
>>21
I suppose you might hold that position if you were a clueless moron with no actual reading experience or writing ability.
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Anonymous2009-12-17 16:45
>>23
There is absolutely nothing wrong with what you just typed.
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Anonymous2009-12-18 5:45
Is there any books that use 'they', 'them' and 'theirs' instead of 'he', 'she', 'him', 'her', 'his' and 'hers'?
>Is there
>any books
Not any you'd be able to comprehend. Have you ever even read a book? It's "Are there... books?" unless you're new-age like these imbeciles that think ebonics is a great medium for literature.
People dragging their disiculous circus acts into art are often idiots who don't know what they're doing. There's a very low chance of such a book being good.
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Anonymous2009-12-18 13:30
disiculous
What.
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Anonymous2009-12-18 15:44
Disiculous circus act #1: Making up new words
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Anonymous2009-12-18 18:08
>>29 >>30
I knew you guys would love my typo version of "ridiculous". I'm not at all pretending it was intentional, but be truthful, you went and tried looking it up, haven't you? GOTCHA FAGITS
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Anonymous2009-12-18 18:12
>>31
Sorry, I only look up words I read in books. Not posts on internet message boards. I assume people on internet message boards aren't intelligent enough to use words I don't know.
>>1
Love Child (1971) by Maureen Duffy does what OP is after.
Oh, and it's far from just one instance of "their" as a singular in Shakespeare. It's found fairly widely in major English authors.
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Anonymous2010-02-24 22:36
"they" "their" and "them" are all PLURAL pronouns. "he" and "she" are SINGULAR pronouns. Therefore, It would be a grammatical error to use "he" and "they" interchangeably.
Also, "he" is a gender inclusive pronoun. It can be used interchangeably with "one", for instance, and can refer to either a male or a female.