You are a pleasure to work with. You are helpful, and you respond really well to feedback.
I in turn didn’t realise that English is not your native language. I’m sorry if I was hard on you. “Folks” is a good inclusive greeting in North American English. “Hello, folks”, or “Hello, everyone” would work well in a posting like this.
In a recent forum post elsewhere, to people I didn’t know, I used “Hello, lovely people”. That’s a bit too affectionate to be normal, but it has the effect of making me sound eccentric, rather than the effect of making people upset.
[quote=“Jim_DeLaHunt, post:4, topic:156696”]
“Folks” is a good inclusive greeting in North American English. “Hello, folks”, or “Hello, everyone” would work well in a posting like this.[/quote]
Interestingly enough, in NZ it would be fairly normal to say “hey guys” to include everyone, including women.
I think Canadians might use the term similarly, but not sure!
In the US, it’s pretty normal for “guys” to be used inclusively, too. But it’s a little like Spanish (and I assume other gendered languages) where the masculine is used for any group that includes men, but never for a group of only women. It would be unusual to hear “guys” used to describe exclusively women. Some people object to it on that basis.
Of course, I’m from the South so I consider y’all the best gender-neutral plural pronoun.
Here I use it to address any groups consisting entirely of male, female, vegetable or mineral > <
But if I catch myself I try not to use it that much online because I definitely see the problem with it, or at least its origins.
