Things we are uncomfortable talking about can be things we need to talk about

[Unseen]

Language is not inflexible. You can use my “pronouns” in the same way as one would use “he” and “him” by simple replacement. Claiming they are not real pronouns is grammatically narrowminded.

[—]

Unseen wrote:

Language is not inflexible. You can use my “pronouns” in the same way as one would use “he” and “him” by simple replacement. Claiming they are not real pronouns is grammatically narrowminded.

Language isn’t a free-for-all either. It’s not narrow-minded to state the obvious fact that your ‘pronouns’ are not fit for purpose, but even if they were, they aren’t analogous to the pronoun issue as it pertains to transgender people.

https://www.unf.edu/lgbtqcenter/Pronouns.aspx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/third-person-gender-neutral-pronoun-thon#:~:text=in%20their%20dictionary.-,thon.,obvious%20analogy%2C%20and%20is%20euphonious.

Notice the difference in how others approach the problem when they’re actually trying to address it rather than fuck about sarcastically?

[Davis]

i) Anyone can reading can tell this is a disingenuous statement.

Disingenuous statements made to score petty points is intellectually low. Gross.

[—]

Davis wrote:

i) Anyone can reading can tell this is a disingenuous statement.

Disingenuous statements made to score petty points is intellectually low. Gross.

Also bad form that he forgot to identify as an attack helicopter. I mean, if we’re gonna pull out the tired tropes, might as well just go for it.

[_Robert_]

Over 50 years ago as it was going down and we were all huddled by our TV, I asked my mother about the famous quote….

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind

That usage just bothered me. She said something like, “yep, we ladies are used to that” and all the girls had a laugh. ‘Humankind’ was available.

I will admit that when going through a divorce it didn’t seem like it was fair to me and that’s just when all that men’s rights crap started. I shook it off, paid for my character misjudgments and now a few years later all that MRA stuff looks like a toxic load of BS. Another time I remember a very androgenous looking classmate who was constantly referred to as “it” by my buddies.

[—]

In a previous job I was drafting a policy regarding marijuana use after the federal government legalized recreational use. Mostly it was an update to existing policy. I used ‘they’ in my draft which then went off to the lawyers. When it came back they’d switch the ‘they’s to ‘he/ she’s. I was tempted to switch it to ‘he/ she/ they’, but then I was all fuck it, let the non-binary people smoke weed on the job if they want.

…all that MRA stuff looks like a toxic load of BS.

The sad thing is, in concept a men’s rights/ issues movement makes sense. There are things that disproportionately affect men that men/ society should discuss. Or if not disproportionately, in different ways. But the public face of the movement was plagued with whataboutism and misogyny seen less as an attempt to care for men and more as a negative response to feminism.

 

[Unseen]

Here’s how flexible language is using an example from our everyday lives. Do you have a blender? an air fryer? a food processor? a microwave? a coffee maker?

Hey, wait a second. A “microwave”? At one time, “microwave” was an adjective in the term “microwave oven.” The adjective became a noun.

What’s an adjective is something that’s used as an adjective and what’s a noun is something that’s used as a noun. The same word even in the same context can be both.

By the same logic “Your majesty” and “His majesty” can certainly be used as pronouns by simply using them that way.

In one of the sources cited by Autumn it’s stated “Pronouns are a set of words that can stand in a sentence in place of a person’s name…” I could probably rest my case on that.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by Unseen.

[jakelafort]

Language evolves. Eventually it will be good English construction when one says/writes, “amount of people.” That hurts me mentally. I am okay with aint. Aint you? As a kid aint was verboten. There was a children’s ditty, “Don’t say aint, your mother will faint, your father will fall in a bucket of paint, sister will die, brother will cry, dog will call the FBI.” So i aint got a problem with aint. It adds starch to the laundry.

[—]

Unseen wrote:

Here’s how flexible language is using an example from our everyday lives. Do you have a blender? an air fryer? a food processor? a microwave? a coffee maker? Hey, wait a second. A “microwave”? At one time, “microwave” was an adjective in the term “microwave oven.” The adjective became a noun. What’s an adjective is something that’s used as an adjective and what’s a noun is something that’s used as a noun.

‘Microwave’ in ‘microwave oven’ is actually a noun (‘microwave oven’ is a compound noun). Verbing nouns is a common practice in English. Wholesale, random substitutions of words is not.

The same word even in the same context can be both. By the same logic “Your majesty” and “His majesty” can certainly be used as pronouns by simply using them that way.

That that logic, we could replace the entirety of English vocabulary with the closest equivalent words in Chinese. We could swap every word with fart noises made with our mouths. But that would ‘t make the swaps fit-for-purpose.

‘Microwaving’ fits a purpose. It describes a specific method of cooking in a word that is immediately obvious to anyone who knows what a microwave is. Not only that, but it’s conjugated like a verb, so anyone familiar with regular verbs in English can tell it’s a verb pretty easily.

What you’ve proposed is a counterintuitive substitution. Your ‘pronouns’ contain other pronouns, they don’t map well as subjective/ objective/ possessive, two of them serve as titles already used to refer to people (or mock them), and they don’t fill any apparent need that existing pronouns don’t already fill.

In one of the sources cited by Autumn it’s stated “Pronouns are a set of words that can stand in a sentence in place of a person’s name…” I could probably rest my case on that.

If you wanted to be wrong at a grade school level, you could rest your case on that. A pronoun is specifically a word that serves the grammatical function of taking the place of a noun. It’s not simply using a different noun (or in this case noun phrase) in place of a name or a pronoun.

[—]

jakelafort wrote:

Language evolves. Eventually it will be good English construction when one says/writes, “amount of people.” That hurts me mentally. I am okay with aint. Aint you? As a kid aint was verboten. There was a children’s ditty, “Don’t say aint, your mother will faint, your father will fall in a bucket of paint, sister will die, brother will cry, dog will call the FBI.” So i aint got a problem with aint. It adds starch to the laundry.

It does evolve. But as with evolution, it’s subject to selection pressures, some more apparent than others. “Ain’t” is a peculiar example because it’s not much worse than “aren’t” save for the corruption of ‘am’ to ‘ai’. In that regard, however, it’s not much worse than shan’t. Certainly all of these contractions have come under scrutiny at various points in history, but “ain’t” got it the worst of the ‘to be’ + ‘not’ set.

English evolves. Many of its mutations, however, with prove deleterious, will suffer loss of habitat, or will fail to breed into the gene pool. It’s not always predictable. And yet sometimes it very much is.

[Simon Paynton]

According to Wiktionary, Your Majesty is a pronoun.

From Google:

pronoun
a word that can function as a noun phrase used by itself and that refers either to the participants in the discourse (e.g. I, you ) or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse (e.g. she, it, this ).

If Unseen wants to call himself His Majesty, I don’t see how this, in reality, lessens or invalidates trans people wanting to choose their own pronouns.

[—]

Simon Paynton wrote:

According to Wiktionary, Your Majesty is a pronoun. From Google: pronoun a word that can function as a noun phrase used by itself and that refers either to the participants in the discourse (e.g. I, you ) or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse (e.g. she, it, this ). If Unseen wants to call himself His Majesty, I don’t see how this, in reality, lessens or invalidates trans people wanting to choose their own pronouns.

According to the dictionary (Oxford English), it’s a noun used as a title:

majesty | ˈmadʒɪsti | noun (plural majesties) 1 impressive beauty, scale, or stateliness: the majesty of Ben Nevis. 2 royal power: the majesty of the royal household. • (Her, His, Their, Your Majesty) a title given to a sovereign or a sovereign’s wife or widow: Her Majesty the Queen | we offer our humble thanks to Your Majesty. • (Her or His Majesty’s) British used in the title of several state institutions: Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools.

 

[Simon Paynton]

Autumn wrote:

it’s a noun used as a title:

You’re right, Unseen isn’t actually a member of the Royal Family, unless he wants to self-identify as one, which nobody else would accept, because it would be ludicrous, it would normally be grounds for a psychiatric diagnosis.

If a trans person wants to self-identify as a person of the opposite sex, then that has validity because inside, they are that sex, and it’s not a mental dysfunction.

[jakelafort]

Majesty takes me to august. Such a nice and underused word.

Even you Autumn are not wont to use august.

[—]

Simon Paynton wrote:

Autumn wrote:

it’s a noun used as a title:

You’re right, Unseen isn’t actually a member of the Royal Family, unless he wants to self-identify as one, which nobody else would accept, because it would be ludicrous, it would normally be grounds for a psychiatric diagnosis. If a trans person wants to self-identify as a person of the opposite sex, then that has validity because inside, they are that sex, and it’s not a mental dysfunction.

i) Unseen never said he wanted to identify as a member of the royal family and no one has said he is not one. The criticisms were his ‘pronouns’ a) disingenuous, b) were not fit-for-purpose as pronouns, and c) were not analogous to the issue of pronouns as it pertains to trans people. Rather than provide substantive criticism, you’ve opted instead to pick a bone (and be wrong) about fourth-grade grammar.

ii) People are often referred to as ‘your majesty’ despite not being royalty. Usually it is sarcastic. It’s still not a pronoun.

iii) One can identify as royalty all they like. It was always purely a social construct. While gender is also a social construct, gender identity is not. Royalty has no real analogue to gender identity. Lineage is probably the closest analogue, but doesn’t fit.

iv) Trans people aren’t making any claim that we are what we are not. We put gender identity forward as the most salient characteristic for determining gender. But this does not mean that trans women, for instance, have a habit of claiming we have uteruses and ovaries and all of the plumbing typically associated with cisgender women. If we did believe that, we wouldn’t recognize that we are trans, would we? We wouldn’t experience dysphoria if we were unaware of our sexual characteristics.

Why, Simon, are you in such a desperate rush that you’d make such a brutally sloppy argument? There are times in life where you step back and realize you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about. Those are learning opportunities. Why not take them?

[Author]

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