#xenopronouns

how-to-make-mistakes:

Today I learnt, completely on accident, of the word ve(/vi/, possessive vis, objective vim), a separate English pronoun equivalent to singular they, first proposed by feminists in 1864 and used in a number of novels published throughout the 20th century (x)

In her Master’s thesis from 1991 (Solving the Great Pronoun Problem), Kelly Ann Sippell provided an extensive list of gender-neutral third-person singular pronouns that had been proposed over the previous hundred and fifty years. This list included, but was not limited to, hes, hiser, hem, ons, e, heer, he’er, hesh, se, heesh, herim, co, tey, per, na, en, herm, em, hir, and shey.

THIS why I say they are “gender neutral pronouns”, “neutral pronouns”, “nonbinary pronouns”, or even “xenopronouns”.

Theyaren’t “neopronouns”. There’s nothing “new” about them and something that’s built to last shouldn’t be defined by its “newness” anyway.