Bits of Polish

There are millions of people in the world who are perfectly comfortable with referring to a table as "he" and a carrot as "she." Polish speakers belong to this group. We pretty much take it for granted – I can’t recall I’ve ever pondered over what exactly makes a carrot feminine… Even though you kind of might expect it to be masculine, considering its shape, and who knows? Maybe in some other gender-distinguishing language it is masculine. It’s entirely possible, since grammatical gender is usually assigned arbitrarily, apart from the clear-cut cases of people, when it follows their natural gender — though it’s easy to lose faith in humanity after discovering that German girls are, grammatically, neuter.

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