I don’t understand this universe any more

[RAF4EVER]

2 minutes ago, Circloy said:

You mean 'this'

 

or IT?

[ckw]

2 hours ago, Circloy said:

You mean 'this'

Fair point ... i should have said "personal pronoun". This is a demonstrative pronoun. You can't use it in place of he/she; his/her

 

Cheers

 

Colin

[Bullbasket]

12 hours ago, ckw said:

You can't use it in place of he/she; his/her

Oh yes you can. When you come home drunk as a skunk and stinking of curry, and swmbo says, "I'm not letting THIS in the house!!"

 

John.

[bentwaters81tfw]

You can't use 'This'......it contains 'his' 

[PhoenixII]

15 hours ago, ckw said:

i should have said "personal pronoun". This is a demonstrative pronoun. You can't use it in place of he/she; his/her

Asking for a friend..............what is the correct address for a person who has declared themselves to be gender neutral........

[ckw]

3 minutes ago, PhoenixII said:

Asking for a friend..............what is the correct address for a person who has declared themselves to be gender neutral........

There really isn't a word we can use - aside from 'it' which doesn't seem very nice!

 

IMHO I think it now has to be up to those who want to escape 'gender typing' to decide what words to use and let us know. If it doesn't already exist (and I couldn't find one), then someone could probably earn themselves a pretty penny by compiling a gender neutral dictionary.

 

To some extent we've been through this before with the Mrs/Miss/Ms - younger viewers will probably not realise this was a big issue a while back. Generally it was resolved by simply asking the person how they preferred to be addressed

 

Cheers

 

 

[Bullbasket]

3 hours ago, PhoenixII said:

Asking for a friend..............what is the correct address for a person who has declared themselves to be gender neutral........

I don't understand all these terms. Is gender neutral anything like carbon neutral, or does it just mean "out of gear".

 

John.

[AWFK10]

5 hours ago, PhoenixII said:

Asking for a friend..............what is the correct address for a person who has declared themselves to be gender neutral........

 Well, apparently........https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/gender-neutral-pronouns

 

Read and despair.

[593jones]

1 hour ago, AWFK10 said:

 Well, apparently........https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/gender-neutral-pronouns

 

Read and despair.

 

I'm just glad I'm retired and don't have to put up with that bs.  The organisation I used to work for would be quite likely to go for that big time.  I try to avoid it by not speaking to anyone.  Well, apart from SWMBO and I know her gender pronoun.

[bentwaters81tfw]

1 hour ago, AWFK10 said:

 Well, apparently........https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/gender-neutral-pronouns

 

Read and despair.

I think I'll just flag down a passing UFO

[alt-92]

4 hours ago, Dogtail2 said:

Lunatic, I would say.

Bit harsh.

I'd ask how they want to be addressed. 

[Mike]

Can we knock this gender bashing on the head please, before someone gets a suspension.  I don't see why we can't live and let live.

[ckw]

4 hours ago, AWFK10 said:

 Well, apparently........https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/gender-neutral-pronouns

That's interesting - I'd not come across any of these before! But why so many? I would have thought you'd want to replace two options with a third (neutral) one - not five! It will be interesting to see what happens over time - whether any or all come into general use. I suspect in a few years one variant will win out  - the others will quietly disappear - and will become as normal as using 'Ms'. 

 

However, I wonder how 'real' or widespread these new pronouns are? I see this post was written in 2018 - my kids live in London and Brighton, have many LBGT+ friends, and I've not yet heard any of them spoken or written.

 

I'm all for it though - a living language must be able to adapt and change with the times. As I said earlier, I think there is a real need for this - but just one please! 5 options only adds to the confusion.

 

Cheers

 

Colin

[GrahamS]

On 12/4/2021 at 5:31 PM, JohnT said:

Whooping and fist punches in air?

Depends who’s snuffed it. I can think of two individuals whose demise would cheer up my entire month.

 

Graham

[IanHx]

10 hours ago, ckw said:

- and will become as normal as using 'Ms'. 

 

oh there's a whole other 

 

For decades I thought Ms was an acceptable alternative to Mrs  where one was unsure of marital status,  until SWMBO put me right that being called Ms was in fact  a mortal insult to a Mrs !

Edited December 12, 2021 by IanHx
spelling

[Mr T]

At the risk of invoking Mike's ire, I would just like to point out that we  largely use 'Miss' and 'Mrs' to denote female martial status, but have no male equivalents and if a woman wishes not to be identified by her martial status then 'Ms' is an alternative and I fail to see a problem. If you need to know whether a person is married you ask them. 

It was only in 1882 that women retained control of their own property after marriage (1870 for wages) and so did a bit more to treat approximately half the population of the country as people with some sort of voice. 

[Bullbasket]

4 hours ago, Mr T said:

At the risk of invoking Mike's ire, I would just like to point out that we  largely use 'Miss' and 'Mrs' to denote female martial status, but have no male equivalents and if a woman wishes not to be identified by her martial status then 'Ms' is an alternative and I fail to see a problem. If you need to know whether a person is married you ask them. 

It was only in 1882 that women retained control of their own property after marriage (1870 for wages) and so did a bit more to treat approximately half the population of the country as people with some sort of voice. 

It's amazing how just one letter in the wrong place can have a totally different meaning to a sentence/story. Sorry T, but I couldn't resist it. I've no doubt that some marriages and a woman's status could be described by the word martial as they are often akin to fighting or war.

 

John.

[Mr T]

The misspelling could reflect the end of my first marriage, so possible Freudian slip given the time of year. In my legal days there were couples whose relationships made that of the frostiest Col War days look positively fraternal! 

[Bullbasket]

22 minutes ago, Mr T said:

The misspelling could reflect the end of my first marriage, so possible Freudian slip given the time of year. In my legal days there were couples whose relationships made that of the frostiest Col War days look positively fraternal! 

I have to proof read everything that I type as my laptop's keyboard often decides that words are not spelt as they should be. Even then , I miss some. Plus, this site's US dictionary is telling me that I have spelt "spelt" wrong. It thinks that it should be "spelled". Not this side of the pond it's not!

 

John.

[Eric Mc]

6 hours ago, Mr T said:

At the risk of invoking Mike's ire, I would just like to point out that we  largely use 'Miss' and 'Mrs' to denote female martial status, but have no male equivalents and if a woman wishes not to be identified by her martial status then 'Ms' is an alternative and I fail to see a problem. If you need to know whether a person is married you ask them. 

It was only in 1882 that women retained control of their own property after marriage (1870 for wages) and so did a bit more to treat approximately half the population of the country as people with some sort of voice. 

Independent taxation of husbands and wives only came into force in the UK in tax year 1988/89.

 

The introduction of the Child Benefit clawback rules in 2013/14 have partially reversed this.

[Mr T]

Yes, I had forgotten about the taxation changes. Common Law essentially treated wives as property (and just about everything else when I come to think of it). 

[treker_ed]

Why is it that buying paint (for household purposes..) such a problem these days......?

 

We have finally (after 8 years of being in the house) gotten around to decorating a number of rooms (my workroom being one of them) in our new build house that we purchased back in 2013. As a result, the wife decided she needed a number of tester pots to try out a few paint samples on the walls of her office (working from home on a permanent basis), my workroom, the kitchen and our en-suite - 16 pots in total!

 

So, went to B&Q as they have a paint mixing centre, had all the #hex numbers, RGB, CMYK and BS381C codes (yes for my room I'm going with some BS colours.....😁) and the response was - no can't do those we only match to the RAL system as we use Valspar, wait what? They only use the German Federal Paint system for colour matching in the UK - the colours I want DO NOT match anything in the RAL system! 😲

They then pointed us to the Dulux Centre in the corner. That's the phrase they used. No directions, nothing. We had to ask another member of staff, who didn't have a clue, and he had to go and ask someone else, who then stated that the Dulux Centre was NOT in the store but outside down the road..... Tried to say to this member of staff that in that case, the counter staff should not be directing customers to the "Dulux Centre in the corner", but she decided to walk off as I am still talking to her! At this I was silently fuming, and decided to go to customer services to make a formal complaint, whilst the wife purchased some other bits we needed. That was dealt with by a manager who happened to be there, who took the comments on board and would feed them back and deal with the other issues!

 

We then went along to the Dulux Centre....

 

Whilst they can accept the RGB, they don't anymore due to problems with paint matching and customers having complained in the past!. Consequently, I had to redo all my paint matches to suit Dulux paint colours only. Website they suggested - E-paints - is the site I used to convert the Hex numbers I had googled into RGB & CMYK references. 20 minutes later, I had the Dulux "near enoughs" and then about 30 minutes after that we had our 16 paint sample pots and we were £85 lighter in our pocket! 

 

I really wish we had not bothered with all this hassle, and just re-painted all the walls (and ceilings) white as they are, but the wife wants some colour in the house instead of neutral colours! 

 

(So much for Hex, RGB & CMYK references being industry standards for paint colour matching - neither place wanted to know despite advertising the fact that you take them a sample or reference and they will match your colour! No they dont, they will only match in their range, and only a near enough match, not an exact match!)😒

 

 

Edited December 13, 2021 by treker_ed

[PhoenixII]

Hi @treker_ed,

for future reference Akzo Noble own both Crown and Dulux paints along with a raft of other companies. Crown used to make all of B&Q own brand paints. This stopped some years ago and Valspar are now the paint of choice for B&Q.

Strange that Valspar should go with the RAL system, as their a U.S. based company.

[Ed Russell]

I was looking for a single word in American English which means "for a moment". In most English dialects you would use "momentarily" but apparently in American English this means "in a moment". I suppose 'briefly' is as close as I can manage.

[IanHx]

3 hours ago, Ed Russell said:

I was looking for a single word in American English which means "for a moment". In most English dialects you would use "momentarily" but apparently in American English this means "in a moment". I suppose 'briefly' is as close as I can manage.

 

fleetingly ?     Haven't given that word a good run out in ages, it fleetingly seemed like a good idea.  Before realising that anyone trying to use such a word down the pub would probably find themselves fleetingly airborne as they were thrown out...

Edited December 15, 2021 by IanHx
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