How does one refer to people who use online handles? [duplicate]
I know this more in line with Etiquette (which is only a proposal), but it's been bugging me for a while, and I'd like some clarification.
When referring to others on this site (and many others, including forums, chat rooms, etc.) sometimes, online handles of users may not reveal gender. For example, taking user @Robusto, if I were to never click on his profile page, how would I refer to .....yeah.
If I'd like to reference @Robusto somehow (pretend I'm thanking @Robusto for @Robusto editing my question)
"Thanks to @Robusto for editing my question, he really helped me out."
or
"Thanks to @Robusto for editing my question, she really helped me out."
or
"Thanks to @Robusto for editing my question, they really helped me out."
or
"Thanks to @Robusto for editing my question, it really helped me out."
What do I do in this case?
Solution 1:
Thanks to @Robusto, who really helped me out by editing my question.
Thanks to everyone. You really helped me out; especially @Robusto for editing my question.
You can often reword around these questions and either have something that works well, or think of something even better. (The second is better if thanking everyone is, worse otherwise).
Otherwise, just use epicene they. If it's good enough for Shakespeare, Thackeray, George Eliot, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bowen, Lawrence Durrell, Doris Lessing, C. S. Lewis, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Fielding, Maria Edgeworth, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the King James Bible, then it's good enough for you.
Thanks to @Robusto for editing my question, they really helped me out.
At least here, where if anyone was to criticise it, someone would come along and point out that great writers had been doing the same thing for the entire history of Modern English.
(In fairness, Samuel Taylor Coleridge would have argued in favour of it, though as far as I know, he only argued one should be able to use it, rather than actually did so).