@BardicWizard Rising from the Last War also uses the same convention in the stat blocks for the Generic NPC section. The descriptions in the surrounding text use they. Maybe that's the style guide for stat blocks?
The D&D (and Forgotten Realms) style guide is available at dmsguild.com/product/267467/… (not that WotC always follows it, and it's got its share of typos)
Singular they is pretty much the standard now for referring to a person of unknown gender. (And the style guides have caught up with that, and thus WotC now uses it in MtG & D&D whereas they didn't used to.)
@AncientSwordRage yeah. As a semi-out enby, I faced some serious problems last year with an Eng-Lit teacher who said no singular they. My preferred pronoun is singular they. It was a long year.
The main exception I can think of common usage of singular they being an unborn (or perhaps as AncientSwordRage suggests a recently born) child, where "they" gets awfully confusing if you aren't referring to twins.
@BardicWizard language changed before she started teaching too. "No singular they" was an arbitrary artificial rule imposed by some manual of style IIRC
And I know that part of why WotC resisted singular they for so long (at least with MtG) was that for rules text it could cause confusion with how many players were supposed to do what, depending on how it's worded.
@Carcer That's actually nice to learn. But I did mean in the standard dialect, the kind that gets used for writing laws, reporting news on TV, writing contracts and EULAs &c.
I have an uncle who used to deliberately play up the dialect when my family were visiting up north, us kids who grew up in the south couldn't understand a word and that amused him a lot
@GcL again, really old teacher in a conservative religious school. I think I had one teacher who actually knew to ask about pronouns for kids on the first day and the rest didn’t bother.
@AncientSwordRage The book I have doesn't have an entry for "youns"
@BardicWizard I have such poor connotations of religious school and such low expectations of them. I nearly got intellectually hamstrung by a biology teacher that did what to today would be called "teaching the controversy". Made subsequently learning molecular biology just a little bit more of an uphill climb. Never forgave them for it.
Come to Finland, lots of opportunities to vote. Municipal elections every four years! MEPs every five years! Parliament every four years! President every six years! Parish council elections every four years! Regional elections every four ye- well no because they've been canceled (before they even had the first one, sans a single-region pilot study) until some issues regarding them are settled
I mean... at least making a bold assumption (that the parish council elections will continue forever) and a much less bold one (that the probability of someone dying over the course of the election is greater than zero)
I feel weird about electing people to perish. I mean, there's plenty of people that probably deserve such a fate, but no good feels about voting to sort out who.