Laundry

[danaeris]

Laundry.

I will do massive loads of laundry to kill the evil bugseses. Then, when I am deloused, I will do it all again. Because bugseses are icky.

Ick.

School was good. Teacher meeting. One of my problem students is getting the boot. Hopefully the others will calm down once zie is gone.

Wah. Do I HAVE to do laundry, mommy?

Comments

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

i've been meaning to ask for ages: what is the deal with the use of "hir" and "zie" as pronouns? what exactly does each refer to, and why bother when we've pressed "they" into service as a gender-neutral third person pronoun?

[emmett-the-sane.livejournal.com]

"They" was archaically used for that purpose, and it's true that in recent years the singular-gender-neutral usage of "they" has returned somewhat.

But... like all overloaded terms, it's awkward. It's hard to know, sometimes, whether one is referring to "they" plural or "they" singular. For that reason, not all English scholars accept the less common usage. Add to that a general desire and direction of society to degenderify the language, and you've got a right mess.

Consider the following:
"One of them dresses so oddly that I cannot tell what gender they are. I think that their Mother must have dressed them."

While we can tell from context that the first "them" is plural and "they" refers to "one" and so is singular, and so on, this is an extremely convoluted rule. Plus, it's not even clear whether the group has a Mother, or the individual. And imagine trying to explain these rules to a nonnative speaker.

Contrawise:
"One of them dresses so oddly that I cannot tell what gender zie is. I think that hir Mother must have dressed hir."

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

in the example you give, i had to read that sentence a few times to figure out that the "zie" and the "hir" are actually referring to the same individual. i find that the pronouns in question clarify nothing and make the confusion worse, but perhaps that's just the technical writer in me talking. the assumption that i find myself wanting to make is that these pronouns in general refer to people who have defined their gender to be neither male nor female.

culturally, i do find it rather interesting that people who live in california are the only people i've ever heard use these pronouns. the rest of the world seems to do just fine without them. in spoken language, if a speaker comes out with an unclear sentence like the example you gave, clarification will be immediately requested and provided; in written language, it is possible to avoid the confusion by avoiding the first "they" entirely.

[emmett-the-sane.livejournal.com]

The confusion you're talking about there is related to a lack of your own familiarity with the words. The confusion with "they" is innate to the language.

And I wouldn't say that requiring clarification is a very good definition of "doing just fine." If that were the judging level for "just fine" in language, we'd all still be using "ugh" and then pointing at things to clarify what we meant by it.

Nor is having to play all kinds of intricate games to avoid conflicting an overloaded word.

And yes, I agree that my home state tends to be one of the world leaders in linguistic progress, as with other types of progress.

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

The confusion you're talking about there is related to a lack of your own familiarity with the words.

yep, that's exactly it. i didn't know what they meant, so i asked :-)

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

culturally, i do find it rather interesting that people who live in california are the only people i've ever heard use these pronouns.

people I know in both CT and MA use them. certainly I first heard them from an MA person, but then, well, I lived there and knew mostly MA people, so that doesn't say too much. I attended gender-studies classes and seminars at MIT in which alternate pronouns were discussed and used by some people.