Generate the answer for a given question. The question requires common knowledge of English. Make sure that the answer is in detail, long, consistent with the context, and requires general knowledge of English. To be less repetitive, please vary your language for each question. Give a proper explanation to answer, and if necessary, provide the definition of various terms. And conclude your answer if it's long. If you have used other resources (e.g., Merriam Webster's.) to answer the question, include citations in your answer. You don't need to paraphrase the context of your resources, but make sure that your answer is consistent and complete.
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Question: I recently had somebody tell me that a mutual friend of ours who is genderqueer prefers that people refer to him/her using the gender-indefinite pronoun they. In some cases, this almost seems okay: Kris left their umbrella at our house. On the other hand, if Kris is sitting right next to you, it feels very odd to say They (meaning just Kris) would like more cake. Or even odder, Kris would like some more cake, can you please pass it to they/them?' Are these usages grammatically correct? Are they in the process of becoming grammatically correct? Are there more correct alternatives?.

Answer: I think the reason for your friend's preference is that using either the male or female pronouns implicitly pigeon-holes the person in question as either one or the other. However, all of the examples you give seem to me to be forced, and to shout out loud 'Hey, look at how sensitive I'm being! I'm not calling Kris either male or female!' There are sensible alternatives to all of these examples that do not break any grammatical rules. 'Kris left their umbrella at our house' : Kris left an umbrella at our house (yes, it could technically then be somebody else's umbrella that was left behind, but would you really know?) 'They [Kris] would like more cake.' : Kris would like some more cake. 'Kris would like some more cake, can you please pass it to they?' : Could you please pass the cake? Kris would like some more. While my dictionary (Chambers 1990) does have a secondary definition of 'they' as 'he or she', it also says that this usage is 'with pl. verb', as in 'there are lots of people; they are happy'. 'They is' would not be correct.


Question: Were Shakespeare books translated to contemporary English? Which version is more common? Is there a rule to choose which books will have its language updated? Are poems updated too? From which year I should expect that books have a 'translation'?.

Answer: Shakespeare is considered Modern English, and is almost never rendered in contemporary English. It is usually edited for spelling and other reasons, however, depending on your edition. There is no 'freshness date' that triggers a translation, though. It depends in large part on which version of English is being cited. Much of Middle English (e.g., Chaucer) is updated to be readable by high-school students, but left intact in scholarly works and upper-level college texts. Old English texts (Beowulf, 'The Dream of the Rood', The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the like) are almost always translated, except for students of Old English (or Linguistics) who are studying the language.


Question: There is a concept in computer science which deals with how to demonstrate negative binary numbers. Two methods for achieving this goal are ones' complement and two's complement. Since I got acquainted with these methods, this question never stops coming to my mind that why the apostrophe is placed differently in ones' vs two's? I also saw many articles using one's instead. Even Google suggests that I might be mistaken! So I want to resolve this issue once and for all. Is it a stylistic preference? What causes this difference? And please provide more examples of similar usage.

Answer:
Donald Knuth, that doyen of computer science, says in Art of Computer Programming, Vol 2.: Detail-oriented readers and copy-editors should notice the position of the apostrophe in terms like 'two's complement' and 'ones' complement': a two's complement number is complemented with respect to a single power of 2, whereas a ones' complement number is complemented with respect to a long sequence of 1s. Indeed, there is also a twos' complement notation, which has radix 3 and complementation with respect to (2...22) (base 3).