Comment 4 for bug 272826

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Leigh Honeywell (hypatia) wrote :

Given the option of a vaguely male-sounding name - and Ubuntero definitely is, as a speaker of several Latin-derived languages - over a generally similar and gender-neutral name, I'm partial to the neutral one.

Gender neutral language is /hard/ to do. But I think it's worth it. I'm looking up this particular issue in the super awesome "Handbook of Nonsexist Writing" by Miller and Swift, but while I do that, I highly recommend Douglas Hofstadter's "Person Paper on Purity in Language" for some insight into why this is worth caring about:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

Thanks Matthew Smith for reporting this! I hadn't actually run across the term before, but it would be great to see it changed to something gender-neutral.

-Leigh