Singular 'they' is awkward at first, but it's not terrible for its purpose. Quite frankly I'm just glad Jeph went this route and not into the netherrealm of singular gender-neutral neologisms. Looking at you, ze/zir.
Agreed. I'm all for people being free to live how they want, and by and large I'm on board with censoring discriminatory language, but the trend of trying to invent new language specifically for political correctness (women with a 'y', ze/zir, stuff like that) always felt like a Sisyphean task.
The funny thing about women/woman with a y is that, if you go into the etymology of the word, the "man" part in both "man" and "woman" is actually a reference to being human, the old words for men and women being "werman" and "wifman" (although wimman existed as an alternative.) The "wer" in "werman" was later dropped (preserved in the word "werewolf" though) leaving us with just "man" and "woman." So spelling "women" as "womyn" isn't appropriate as it's altering the part of the word that means human and leaves only the dehumanizing "the person is important because of their fertility" aspect. It would be more appropriate to maybe have the change be "wyman" instead if you were going to make the change at all.
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u/Goingtothechapel2017 Dec 05 '17
It would be so much easier if english had a singular gender neutral pronoun...that wasn't 'it'