Andy Hutchins: A gender-neutral third-person pronoun has arisen spontaneously as a part of kids' slang in Baltimore

Jul 12, 2012
6,032 notes

A gender-neutral third-person pronoun has arisen spontaneously as a part of kids' slang in Baltimore

queerandpresentdanger:

“What’s also interesting about the kids’ language is that people — mostly academics — have been trying to introduce a gender-neutral singular pronoun into the English language for about 200 years, with very little success. And then a group of kids in Baltimore just make one up and start using it.”

first, i love this. I guess I am in a loving mood today! :D

but second—i love this for a couple of reasons.

first—yo is also a word that is played around with in spanish as well—and it randomly makes me think about Y@ and what potential messing around with Y@ has.

second—the thing i love most is that this came out of community. i’ve struggled *mightily* with a lot of stuff as it pertains to gender…nothing can ever be easy peasy for my ass, right? but one of the biggest thing is that my gender is *intimately* connected to my community in a lot of ways that fuck you, i’m not going to talk about. but as i’ve said before—i wish that instead of five pages of different acronyms, gender based resources would ground themselves in community and then explain how, for example, chican@ cultural understandings of gender interact with white supremacist heteropatriarchy. i hate that so many fucking resources come from 501c3’s or academia.

anyway. yay on these youth. YAY. someday my old warthog ass will catch up to their brilliance.

Just some things:

High marks in the Missing The Point Olympics over here.
The Grammar Girl article that is linked here is from 2008. Apart from a flurry of interest in 2008 and one since this was originally posted yesterday, not much on the Internet about this. Gap in Baltimore kids using the Internet? Slang not growing with the kids? The usage wasn’t as prevalent as initially suspected?
LOL at “They even went so far as to review lyrics from over 3,000 rap songs to see if it might have come from rap music.” Did they just search OHHLA?
I’ve read it three times, and I cannot find the ableism and cissexism in the article, but if someone with a better lens than I have can find it, I’d honestly really like to know where it is.

(Source: motherfuckerofbabylon, via iinventedeverything)