English may be a hot mess but at least we don't have to worry about this nonsense

robocall@lemmy.world to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 1098 points –
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A washing machine is obviously female because doing laundry is a thing for women.

And now I will sit back and watch how many people get mad at me because they don't understand sarcasm.

And now I will sit back and watch how many people get mad at me because they don't understand sarcasm.

Really getting worked up over that imaginary person you created huh? Lol

To be fair if he hadn't invented the imaginary person to be offended for, someone else would have

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No. It's feminine because you put dirty things in it.

EDIT: I'm going to get lynched by the hyper vigilant with you. We're in this together now.

Not knowing anything about French, this was my assumption and reasoning.

You already stated sarcasm and this is Lemmy, so whatever popcorn you expect must come from the floor

I mean I'm pretty sure a lot of it comes from things like that, I also notice quite often the positive things are male while the negative opposite is female: le beau temps/le soleil, la pluie ; le plaisir, la douleur ; le jour, la nuit; etc etc.

Edit: not sure why this comment is getting downvoted, do you think I'm saying it's a good thing the language was built on sexist principles? Here's an article that talks about how it wasn't always like that and there was a campaign in the 17th century to masculinize the language, making the masculine the "noble" gender in grammatical rules. It's not far fetched to think similar principles applied to gendering random things.

It's not a coincidence, it's systemic sexism. If you use sexism as your guiding principle when if comes to generated nouns, in almost every language that has them, you'll be right most of the time.

Not sarcasm: washing machien is female in Russian.

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