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    1. Do you use gender-neutral pronouns? Which one do you prefer?

      A series of gender neutral alternatives for the third person singular pronouns (he/she/it) have been proposed throughout the recent years (and maybe decades). I wonder the preferences of fellow...

      A series of gender neutral alternatives for the third person singular pronouns (he/she/it) have been proposed throughout the recent years (and maybe decades). I wonder the preferences of fellow users here in that regard. So I'd be glad if you could answer the questions in the title, and maybe elaborate a bit on the reasons of your preference. I'm both interested in this generally, and it could be useful as a means to help me practice quantitative linguistic variation (obviously this would hardly be scientifically usable source of data for actual real research so I'm not asking this for that purposes). I'll add my preference as a comment.

      31 votes
    2. Western Christianity isn't dying out from natural causes. It's dying of suicide.

      Original article in 'The Telegraph': Western Christianity isn't dying out from natural causes. It's dying of suicide. Same article syndicated in 'The Age': Why Western Christianity has a death...

      Original article in 'The Telegraph': Western Christianity isn't dying out from natural causes. It's dying of suicide.

      Same article syndicated in 'The Age': Why Western Christianity has a death wish. (in case the paywall on the Telegraph article blocks you)

      16 votes
    3. How long does it take you to read an academic journal article?

      I feel like I'm a bit slow, though I'm gaining practice. I cannot read two moderate or long-ish papers in one day. I guess part of that reason is that the field I'm mostly reading in is a field...

      I feel like I'm a bit slow, though I'm gaining practice. I cannot read two moderate or long-ish papers in one day. I guess part of that reason is that the field I'm mostly reading in is a field I'm new to, though in accordance with that what I'm reading often is kindo-of introductory material (linguistics, and Linguistics Handbook ed. Aronoff, 2017). A chapter is around the size of an average paper (around 25-30 pages). Another factor may be that I'm not a native speaker of English, but I think I do have a quite decent command of it especially when reading, enough to read through ~60 A4 pages in five-six hours, but I just can't do it.

      So I wonder if I'm too slow or maybe exaggerating it a bit? How long does it take for you, and how many can you read, without skimming/skipping, in a "day"?

      11 votes