A thought for change month (in General)

Yesterday I made a part serious/ part tongue-in-cheek post to the "Post ideas for change month here" thread about minion gender, and how Regan The WonderDog is a girl and is offended, etc. etc., etc.

Then I realized that it wasn't such a bad idea, as there are a couple of gender-biased items outside of the play-by-play that could use a nerf/change, for example:

Bast prefers to keep his email address private, so you can only mail him through this form
-- You are ignored by XXXX XXXX: must be that time of the month.

Just a thought. Ladies, back me up here! :)

I still remember back on CB1 Bast made a fuss about the being-/ignore'd message. Jon didn't change it then, so I don't see a change happening soon. And the ignore message is more offensive, in my opinion, than referring to 'his' rather than 'her'. In addition, these threads have come up previously on CB1 and nothing was done about it. (See the references 3 and 4 at the bottom for examples.)

There is one valid (seemingly) point that one can make for keeping the gender the way it is:

"John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was a major scholar of the English language, specialising in Old and Middle English".¹ Considering that Tolkien specialized in Old & Middle English and that the majority of references in this game are from Tolkien's era, one can come to the assumption or conclusion that the default gender should be masculine, since in these particular languages masculinity had been the default for grammatical purposes.²

However, there is the opposite view that the era we are in currently is not the focus of Old or Middle English. We use Modern English, thus we should differentiate between the male and female gender.

References: [3], [4]

Thanks, SNK3R. Having not been part of CB1, that is all new to me, so I see that it's not a new issue. I agree that the "his", "him" part isn't necessarily a huge deal, and understand Jonathan not wanting to spend the time coding a gender field. The ignore message, however, I would like to see changed, to the point where I would seriously consider "bribing" or "hiring" Jonathan to make it more generic and less annoying, something like "someone needs a nap", or "needs their diaper changed", or "didn't get their way again".

But that's just one man's opinion (and PayPal balance, if that's what it takes) :)

Origins of the word 'Woman'? >;)

I personally find ignore notifications silly altogether

I'm with you, Barzoo. And I don't find "We've always been backward, backward we will certainly stay!" a particularly good argument.

Is it still a matter of privately funding the change, Jon?

I think Jon recently mentioned something about work for hire being a thing of the past. Maybe one of the other commiters?