Back when I first heard of your AIM name, I was thinking, “When pigs fly.”

And now, I think H1N1.
Funny how your name was the hardest hit by this global EPIDEMIC. <:|

I’m not sure if that makes sense to me. ‘Their’ works, I know, but it’s common knowledge that it can take a specific indeterminate object. ‘He’ was generally the default “gender-neutral” pronoun in the case of a specifically mentioned, indeterminate object.

For further clarity, we’ll point to your examples. All forms of ‘they’ that you mention have unspecified people, or a group of people as their antecedents. They don’t have a specific person, like, for example, “my next child” or “the doctor”.

I’m not proposing that we have ridiculously made up names. I think it’d be nice to push for ‘they’ to include indefinite singular objects. I’m just more a fan of the (possibly sexist) ‘he’ as an indeterminate pronoun. It might be archaic, but I enjoy tradition as being a meaningful part of my heritage, and archaic things stay with me (translation: I’m a stubborn jackass who does’t want to evolve).

Steve, by virtue of his classical education, probably has a fairly deep understanding of human nature and understands that the extraneous activity of singing loudly at 2:30AM in Spanish is not too strange when compared to other human behaviors. It is therefore within the scope of human behavior. After all, humans created war, and do it for very little reason these days. A little singing is pretty common, comparatively.

You, on the other hand, approach things by way of how often this activity occurs, and if such a thing happens (or would happen) rarely,then it must be ’strange’.

In response to the point on a human being probabilistic, yet random enough to still have a ’soul’ or free will, going back to the whole ‘predetermination vs. free will’ argument, I personally believe that they are independent of each other, and that a human is relatively deterministic, and given enough information, can be understood near completely, and predict his reactions and actions for any given situation, and yet still has free will.

Predetermination and free will are independent of each other. It is simple. If free will is defined as our intent, and the action of our intent, then that act is an act of a human, and his responsibility. The responsibility is the result of his freedom to do what he wants, and what he wants, though deterministic, is still his, and dependent on himself. His action may be predetermined, because all things can be determined if the pattern is correct, but it is still his action.

Sorry for the long response, I was bored, and thinking.

Bahahahaahahaha!