this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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The classical answer to a male is: do you sleep with guys?
I don't remember the grammatical names, but there's a difference between using "guys" in your phrase and the way it's used in the title. So it can be gender neutral depending on context.
The same as in "All men are equal", and "Do you like men or women?".
I guess having to explain this is a good enough reason to avoid this allegedly gender-neutral word in gender-neutral contexts
Only for people that did not made through elementary school.
Do you include in this group everyone with English as a foreign language like me?
English is my second language too, but my mother tongue has neutral genders the same. I don't know how it works in your primary language, but if it is not the same, I guess you have to learn more about how it works before trying to tell the native speakers to abandon context.
I’m happy that we can now at least forget about inferring the education levels of people.
What I do see though is the usage of the language by native speakers. I pretty much never see a woman addressing a group of women by the "gender-neutral" "guys". I often see males addressing a group of males by "guys". Even this mismatch tells me enough about how neutral this term is among the people I see.
I also see males addressing a mixed group by "guys". When called out, they say "oh, but I didn’t mean it like that, many other people do that, the word is now neutral". Which might be even true despite the evidence mentioned above, but it still carries an awful lot of resemblance to other excuses about non-neutral language and behavior. I guess you can see why some people see this as an excuse.
I come from a country which in the last century had probably the best women’s rights in the whole world. And it still struggles with appropriate usage of neutral-gendered and "female"-gendered forms of words, and the excuses are all the same.
sometimes they might
Sure, and this only strengthens the point of the counter question
Heh. "Guy" has some interesting history. It originally referred to Guy Fawkes, because that was his name. Then it came to mean any person, gender neutral, then it became any man, now gendered, but the neutral definition never went away, so we have both meanings floating around still, but the original meaning, an effigy of Guy Fawkes, died.
(I skipped a few steps in there because they're not relevant between guy Fawkes and any person)