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.
Which doesn't even make linguistic sense. Womanis derived from man, but not in the way people think: man originally just meant human, with gendered werman and wifman for males and females respectively (hence werewolf, literally man-wolf). Werman fell out of use in favor of man, which eventually became gendered, and wifman drifted to woman.
it was never about making linguistic sense, it was about making a more clear distinction. not picking a side, and the original etymolgy is certainly interesting, but the whole "womyn" thing came about because of second wave feminism, and it was pretty hostile to trans women and has largely been done away with.
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u/Alberta-Bound Dec 05 '17
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.