I’m a Southern transplant living in New England for the last couple decades and I’ve never thought of “y’all” as being indicative of right-wingedness. I use it all the time and it doesn’t feel like anyone thinks anything of it.
My last company did this. They’d also send out surveys and training from addresses I didn’t recognize, so I’d report those, too, only to be told they were legit 😂
Robert Evans wrote a post on it and did multiple podcast episodes.
The TL&DR is that AI-generated children’s books are crap, without a coherent storyline or any literary niceties like “foreshadowing” and “beginning middle and end”. Kids are still learning what stories look like, so if you hand them AI-generated stuff they might know it’s unsatisfying, but they can’t put into words why their books are wrong.
It looks like the house just has a weird roofline, and the doors go to storage in the eaves. It’d look less wonky if the built-in storage was shelves or something instead of these mini doors.
I apologize, I don’t think we’re disagreeing. Fiction can, but often doesn’t, describe something in sufficient detail to be cited as “prior art” during a patent application or dispute. It comes down to how broad the claims are in the patent.
If someone were to try and patent “sliding doors”, a patent examiner could point at Star Trek and say “Sliding doors are already described in published material, your invention is not original”.
If someone were to try and patent “Mechanism X, used for making sliding doors slide”, that might be patentable because Star Trek (and other published material) didn’t describe Mechanism X.
I’m wicked sorry, I don’t have a good answer. You could try Mx and see how it feels. I’ve dropped sir/ma’am for folks that I know, or that appear my age or younger. I still use it for older folks I don’t know out in the wild.
I, personally, never take offense at being misgendered in a Southern accent if I’m called “ma’am”. I grew up in the South and to me it just feels like someone’s trying their best to be polite and I take it as intended. Sometimes I also just misparse it as “man”, which feels a bit informal, but whatevs. Miss still feels creepy, but I get that less now that I’ve hit 30.
If you’re working at a drive through where there’s a customer/service worker dynamic, I’d 1. go with ma’am or sir 2. accept it if someone corrects you, and 3. recognize you’re more likely to be yelled at by someone for using a ‘new-fangled honorific’ than for misgendering someone.
Edit: Oh! I have replaced “Thank you sir/ma’am” with “Thank you, kindly” and that seems to work for me.
Not really. There’s plenty of gender-neutral names, some you wouldn’t expect. The names Ashley, Chris, Harper, Morgan, and Stacey are all gender-ambiguous (Showing my white American background with this list). Plus, people can have genders that don’t match their name.
Seconding the honorific “Mx”. From what I’ve seen, it’s decently well-adopted in the non-binary community. I’ve not seen it much used outside of that community–it seems to be used mostly when someone ‘needs’ an honorific but doesn’t fit into the 1950s list. I’ve heard it pronounced “Mix” and “Mux”. I tend to go with “Mix”.
IRL, I’ve used “Hey, you” and “Yo!” when hollering at folks I don’t know (example, “Yo! You dropped something!”)
Sidenote: As a nonbinary person, I prefer not being given an honorific over being given the wrong one.
Minirant not directed at OP: And omg, if you need to go with a feminine honorific and you don’t know whether the person is married, go with Ms, not Mrs. or Miss. The connotations of the wrong one are just creepy.
Not married and called Mrs=“Hey, you’re too old to be unmarried. Please feel judged about your relationship status”
Married and called Miss=“Hey, you’re too young to be married. Please feel like I don’t respect you as an adult.”
In all cases Ms=“I don’t know and/or care about your marital status and I’m trying to be polite”
I’m not saying that devices described by fiction are patentable based on the description in the fiction. But, those descriptions could be used to prove that the ‘invention’ is too obvious to be patentable. Page 7 of this document from the USPTO going over what ‘prior art’ is suggests that fiction can be used as prior art.