Reminding Starbucks that Beautiful Code Should Make Beautiful Language

Reminding Starbucks that Beautiful Code Should Make Beautiful Language(aarondinin.com)

15 points by apdinin 12 years ago | 41 comments

PhasmaFelis 12 years ago |

As a grammar nerd, I call bullshit. "They" as gender-neutral singular pronoun has been part of the English language for centuries, and it's only in the last hundred years or so (give or take a bit, I don't have time to look it up right now) that prescriptivists have started freaking out about it. Yeah, it's a little awkward, but modern English NEEDS a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and "they" is the best we have.

It was good enough for Shakespeare, and it's good enough for me.

ronaldx 12 years ago |

I dislike the premise of this article.

All the alternatives have worse disadvantages:

- repeating the name "Matt" is awkward

- gender is an awkward requirement for sending a giftcard

- assuming someone is male unless they are known to be female is awkward

- "he/she" is awkward

And, crucially:

- singular they is widely used and understood and has significant historical precedent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

rtb 12 years ago | |

+1. This article is rubbish. Singular "they" is fine.

Gormo 12 years ago | |

Of course, there's always the option of side-stepping the entire issue:

> Matt Hofstadt wanted to make your day, and has sent you a $20 gift card...

jofer 12 years ago |

I don't understand the outrage over singular "they". I agree that it's not particularly logical, but what part of the English language is?? It sounds natural, at least. It's certainly widely used, and will likely become a "correct" form within a few decades.

The OP suggests guessing gender from names. There are too many unusual cases and gender-neutral names to be able to guess gender from a name alone. Even ignoring non-english-speaking world, I know several guys named "Kelly" and "Kim" and I have a female cousin named "James" (she goes by "Jill", though).

Adding a gender field is often not feasible and a bad idea for other reasons (gender identity, etc). It's far better to sidestep the issue with commonly-used-but-not-quite-formally-correct grammar, i.m.o.

jaibot 12 years ago | |

Singular "they" is a real thing. People who get upset about it are the worst.

ndnichols 12 years ago | |

I'm with you 100%. John McWhorter wrote a nice piece on it recently for TNR: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112896/tyranny-pronouns-f...

lubujackson 12 years ago | |

Luckily, grammar rule don't evolve from what grammaticians want but from what people use. And a singular "they" sounds natural and follows the trend of language streamlining where it is most heavily used (there's a trend of irregular verbs becoming regular verbs based on usage).

aaronbrethorst 12 years ago |

    Wasn’t that easy?

No, because there are a reasonably large number of people, especially in Starbucks' home town, who want to be referred to as ze, zer, or one of a number of other gender-neutral, recently-minted pronouns. http://www.warren-wilson.edu/~writingcenter/Gender-Neutral_L...

So now you either need to ask a user for their name and preferred pronoun, or just refer to them as "they".

garg 12 years ago | |

Here are some more sources -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Gender-neutral_la...

and

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Singula...

Using the singular-they seems to be completely acceptable and preferable to the alternatives provided by the author.

kyllo 12 years ago | |

Did you read the article? The point he made was, if you don't know which gendered pronoun to use, just use their name!

"In a case like the generic email I got from Starbucks where the gender of the purchaser is likely unknown, the solution is even easier. Try this little programmatic trick:

    [$first_name] [$last_name] wanted to make your day so [$first_name] sent you a $20.00 USD Starbucks Card eGift to spend on your favorite beverage."

Or "this person" would work in many situations as well.

Also, what is "especially in Starbucks' home town" supposed to mean?

FireBeyond 12 years ago | | |

Bleh. I think his "correction" is as 'horrific a travesty against language' as the original:

"John Smith wanted to make your day so John sent you a gift card."

That is not even remotely elegant.

jaibot 12 years ago | | |

Seattle is home to a pretty progressive culture, and is much more amenable to pronouns outside of the traditional gendered binary breakdown.

aaronbrethorst 12 years ago | | |

> Also, what is "especially in Starbucks' home town" supposed to mean?

Seattle has a relatively large genderqueer population.

lubujackson 12 years ago | | |

So the solution is to never use pronouns?

gruseom 12 years ago |

Speaking of pretentious-douchebag-grammar-nerds, allow me to explain the evolution of the “I’m going to refer to a singular noun with a plural pronoun” linguistic phenomenon. It’s a product of increased gender equality. People used to generically refer to everyone as males

That's entirely and entirely typically wrong. Singular "they" has been well-established in English for centuries. The great writers have always used it freely—that includes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and seemingly everybody else. "A person can't help their birth," says Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. (Edit: it's fun to dig up these classical examples, because they sound so modern and fresh. "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes"—Wilde. "It's enough to drive anyone out of their senses"—Shaw. "Everybody does and says what they please"—Byron.)

The ironic thing is that the "rule" about generic "he" (and later, "he or she" and all the other stilted variants) was fabricated by grammarians who looked at how English actually worked, said "Goodness no that can't be right because Latin doesn't do that", and started telling everybody their grammar was wrong.

(Notice how I just used singular "they". Should I have said, "telling everybody his grammar was wrong"? Or "his or her", or "his/er", or just "her", if you're one of those? Or, to adapt the OP's suggestion, "telling everybody everybody's grammar was wrong"?)

People never stopped using it, though, and by 1850 the grammarians were so indignant about this that they petitioned the British Parliament to make "he" the legal standard. And people kept on using "they", because it works.

Edit: There are so many sources on this that you can't kick Google without stirring some up, but http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-th... and http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html are particularly good and http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h... is hilarious.

jdminhbg 12 years ago |

Asking for a gender on a signup form with binary choice is a good way to end up at the center of a protest from the perpetually aggrieved. Repeating the sender's name in consecutive clauses is clunky and jarring. It would be much easier to just reconstruct the sentence slightly:

"Matt Hofstadt wanted to make your day by sending you..."

Mindless2112 12 years ago |

Singular they was covered on an episode [1] of Lexicon Valley, which might be enlightening to anyone who opposes its use (and interesting to pretty much anyone).

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2012/0...

tehwalrus 12 years ago |

They isn't just plural, it's also gender-neutral.

Gender neutral pronouns: they're here to stay[1].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46ehrFk-gLk

emef 12 years ago |

This would require either a whole new field on the checkout form (gender) or some incomplete database lookup for gender-name mappings; neither is a good option. Using 'they' is pretty common practice to refer to someone gender neutrally.

jonsterling 12 years ago |

This is so fucking stupid. “They” has been a singular pronoun since the Middle English period (Linguist here).

paul_willis 12 years ago |

You could have called Starbucks out for things a lot worse than using a singular 'they'.

joezydeco 12 years ago |

For every Starbucks messing up he/she/they, I can count 10 websites that can't get this right:

  printf("%d %s in your cart",x,(x==1) ? "item" : "items");

  0 items
  1 item 
  2 items

I could swear eBay printed "1 items" for the first decade of it's existence.

kzrdude 12 years ago | |

you'll have to revisit that for localization, you could use ngettext or similar right away.

joezydeco 12 years ago | | |

That's a whole level of difficulty above this, my friend.

JosephRedfern 12 years ago |

    Redeeming your eGift couldn't be easier. All you need to do is:
    1. Redeem your eGift
    2.
    3.

That doesn't really work for me, either. Surely steps 2/3 would never be reached - you'd end up in an infinite eGift redemption loop!

noctolater 12 years ago |

Something a lot of people are missing: Not all cultures do [first name] [last name].

gojomo 12 years ago | |

Indeed, and asking for (and subsequently handling) first-name/last-name splits can thus be awkward.

Also, while I haven't stepped through Starbucks' gifting flow recently, gift cards might be given by collective entities as well, like "Your friends on the swim team" or "The Middleton Book Club".

'They' works better for that, too.

Starbucks' copywriter (or copywriters) knew what they were doing.

lmm 12 years ago |

"Matt Hofstadt wanted to make your day so Matt sent you..." is uglier and less pleasant to read than the version with "they've". I don't see any argument in the article for what's actually wrong with using "they" - sure, it violates one of English's alleged rules, but the author acknowledges that those rules don't actually matter.

(Personally I think women should insist on being called "he" - "she" is a grammatical diminutive which implies inferiority - but given that they haven't, singular they is the best approach available).

gruseom 12 years ago | |

"she" is a grammatical diminutive which implies inferiority

No it isn't. No it doesn't! Where'd you get that from?

egypturnash 12 years ago | |

(I'm a woman and I really would rather not textually eradicate my gender, thank you very much.)

lmm 12 years ago | | |

"poetess" has been more or less eliminated from the language, and "actress" and "policewoman" are on their way out - at the behest of feminist groups. So it seems your compatriots disagree with you?

herbig 12 years ago |

Using singular they is fine, but since too many people will jump on you and say you're doing it wrong, it's probably a better play to just restructure the whole sentence to avoid gender and the awkward double first name. Something like:

"$NAME wants to make your day with a $20 gift card..."

The author here is incorrect. I also dislike namedropping random startups / people I've never heard of, or actually just namedropping in general.

Also: http://xkcd.com/326/

apdinin 12 years ago |

As the author, I should probably take my own advice and do what I always tell my students. If the structure of the sentence causes so much controversy that it distracts from the meaning, change the sentence. Allow me to offer an alternative that solves everything:

"Matt Hofstadt wanted to make your day by sending you a $20.00 USD Starbucks Card eGift to spend on your favorite beverage."

jlgreco 12 years ago | |

> "As the author, I should probably take my own advice and do what I always tell my students."

The structure of that sentence irrationally infuriates me. I find it so distracting that I have been unable to glean any meaning from the rest of your post. You should therefore change it.

jlgreco 12 years ago |

> "the mistake is surely damaging the “high quality” brand Starbucks cultivates in order to sell $5 coffee."

I would love to see the author try to seriously defend that assertion.

haliphax 12 years ago |

Not only is singular "they" perfectly acceptable, but the author neglected to point out the missing comma in the first sentence.

pasquinelli 12 years ago |

they can be used for singular. grammarians are, necessarily, several decades behind their actual language (but they never seem to want to admit it).

anyway, if Aaron Dinin really wants a fix, they (!!!) should've just removed the sickening and pointless, "wanted to make your day". so:

"Matt Hofstadt sent you a $20.00 USD Starbucks Card eGift to...", blah blah blah blah blah.

thehme 12 years ago |

ha! this is awesome coming from super expensive coffee selling Starbucks, who just increased the price of their products, so they can pay for professional editing...lol, j/k

The author's solution about using the first name of the person should be the standard across the board. It hurts to read these sentences as much as reading bad code.