Best Practices: Gender Swap Variables

Another fun, exciting reason to use singular they for your variable names: the object and possessive forms are totally distinct (example sentence taken from the pronoun dressing room):

That smile of theirs really makes me happy. I could talk to them all day although they don’t talk about themself much. I wonder if their day has been wonderful. I hope so!

Compare:

That smile of hers really makes me happy. I could talk to her all day although she doesn’t talk about herself much. I wonder if her day has been wonderful. I hope so!

Or the masculine:

That smile of his really makes me happy. I could talk to him all day although he doesn’t talk about himself much. I wonder if his day has been wonderful. I hope so!

My pronoun initiation code block in my WIP looks like this:

Block of code ~10 lines
*create they     "he"
*create their    "his"
*create them     "him"
*create theirs   "his"
*create themself "himself"
*create theyre   "he's"
*create are      "is"
*create were     "was"
*create theyve   "he's"
*create have     "has"
*create plural   false

The boolean flag is what I use for multireplace for verb forms, when distinguishing between plural verbs for singular they and the more usual singular verbs.

Surely you want to know who ${h_they} @{h_plural meet|meets} with.

13 Likes