Anyone else find this fairly recent phenomenon of gender pronouns, non-binary genders etc in Western colleague campuses fascinating?
Seems to be really heating up at some universities. Professor Petersonâs life at University of Toronto has been turned into living hell.
Meh. Itâs Canada, so itâs to be expected.
So what âcommentsâ did he make exactly? The article doesnât say.
I dunno, but itâs maybe going to get to the point where qualified teachers canât be bothered with these precious little flowers anymore. Theyâll end up with airheads who will happily indulge their pronoun fantasies while being unable to teach anything of substance.
As for those âacceptableâ pronouns, it all sounds like some bizarre mashup of German and Cornish. Ey is down at the farrm this morninâ, but eir forgots to bring ze beer und pasties.
âWhatâs your name again?â
Wow, I guess learning those Latin declensions back in high school was good preparation for the new reality. You know, back when they actually taught stuff in school.
Old Latin teachers never die, they just declineâŚor get hired as consultants for new gender pronoun committees.
The solution to this problem isnât adding more pronouns and create more chances for making a mistake⌠Some of the gender-neutral pronoun suggestions sort of goes back to Englishâs Germanic roots, such as the various ways of writing ze, pronounced just like the German sie. Problem is the s part carried gender meaning in German. Just hearing ey also suggests plural.
I suggest just dropping the initial constants and just go with i, like Taigiâs third person pronoun. The /i/ sound is consistant with the singular pronoun in Germanic languages. Conjugation can be
i - Subject
ir - Object
ir - Dependent Possessive
irs - Independent Possessive
irself - Reflexive
The language nerd in me thinks this is fascinating. However, the practical me feels that the established use of âthey/them/theirâ as a gender neutral pronoun is just fine. Does it cause confusion? Only as much confusion as our double-use singular/plural âyouâ does, In other words, weâre coping just fine now.
I suggest printing T-shirts: âsome pronouns have gender. Get over it.â
I genuinely donât understand why trans people (as in the picture) would have an issue with âheâ or âsheâ. Presumably if they actively reject whatever their birth gender was, and typically adopt the dress and gender-stereotypes of the opposite gender, why not adopt the appropriate pronoun too?
I get that some people consider themselves asexual, but then chairs are asexual too, and French people donât have any problem referring to chairs as feminine.
The singular form of they can have a completely takeover, and we can have theyâall, they guys for plural⌠we can also have allâtheyâall, and allâthey guysâŚ
Many of these alternative, non-English pronouns were proposed 40 or 50 years ago. They never caught on because thatâs not how languages evolve.
Nouns, verbs and adjectives are quite fluid, easily changing and borrowing from other languages or being bolstered by neologisms; however, pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions remain very static.
I could work with âtheyâ but referring to someone that way in their presence would seem really weird. If asked, fine though. I donât think anyone gets to ask more than that until it becomes commonly accepted usage.
I think the answer is staring us in the face. English already has a gender neutral pronoun: âit.â And itâs already used for people in sentences like âWho was it?â âIt was Roger.â The only problem would be overcoming the âinanimate objectâ associations. Oh, and coming up with a pluralâŚâitsâ seems a little ambiguous. Come to think of it, maybe âtheyâ would work.
Iâm fine with âtheyâ too, but I donât like it when people write something like âI saw a man walking down the street. They were wearing a hat.â If the gender of the person is established, use the gendered pronoun.
Getting used to and expecting this from others severely limits your options in life. Like tatooing your neck or face. Forget about most of the business world accommodating you. And what do you do when you travel abroad?? Correct peopleâs use of your gender pronouns every ten seconds??
Probably why it seems to be mostly a university campus thing.
these new gender and sexuality trends are something else. i opened okcupid a few days ago, from an e-mail. for some reason it is set to london so i opened a few girls profiles out of curiosity. every one of them says something like pansexual, sapiosexual, bisexual, frying pan sexual, binary something or other⌠and their profiles are filled with even more nonsense. what has created this generation of super miserable pompous assholes? i hope to god these trends do not reach these shores.
In Spain, one of my coworkers got a lawsuit for not using usted.
I am pretty sure that you could end up with a black eye asking the right Macho , whatâs your name and what pronoun to use? If you are lucky, he doesnât know what a pronoun is.
I think thatâs exactly the point though. Itâs a statement from the person in question that their gender canât be defined simply as âmanâ or âwomanâ.