WHAT IF YOU’RE A SENTIENT SPACECRAFT who wants to be more than an intelligent weapon to implement government policy? Do you partner with another by-the-book sentinel like the one you just lost to your enemies or gamble on someone different, even if they are a middle-aged dad from a primitive world called Earth? And can you learn to work with him before your enemies kill billions?
…
I already hate “What if” book descriptions, but this one is worst than most. Especially when it bludgeons the subjunctive mood in the first sentence.
(sigh). You mean like the late, great Anne McCaffrey’s Brain & Brawn series? AKA the Brainship series? Starting with “The Ship Who Sang”?
Isekai genre is going wild…
What if you’re a reader of a primitive language called English who realizes that the clause “If they are a middle-aged dad” sounds terrible due to the clash of plural and singular? Could you manage to read this blurb without your inner grammar Nazi turning you into Godzilla?
Even if one uses “they” as gender neutral 3rd person singular as I do, in place of he or she, “they” and dad clash
I realize that “they” is now PC, but honestly, it’s bloody dreadful. I was chastised by someone on another site, for using “s/he’ (the poster claimed it wasn’t a real word, and I pointed out that the OED disagreed, which at least put paid to that ), but “THEY” as a gender-neutral 3rd person, in at least 90% of the instances in which it is now deployed, is simply s**t. It’s very difficult for folks who are paying some remote attention to grammar to use it, IMHO.
There’s nothing more neutral than it.
Oh, hell, brother. Go ahead and try THAT one. Talk about being prosecuted! I agree it’s gender-neutral…but “neutral” it ain’t. I think that would get one in more trouble than “s/he.” I just really hate murdering the language and sounding illiterate, to be “correct” by some never-static standard.
Agreed. I will use “they” as a preferred personal pronoun only if the individual in question has Multiple Personality Disorder.
It’s just bloody clunky. I don’t wish to be a Neanderthal, but…to revise all our concepts of remotely decent grammar, just for PC-ness and virtue signalling is pissing me off. Fine, some folks don’t wish to be either. Okay, fine. Let’s find something suitable, then. Not…take a hatchet to the language.