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Monday, December 07, 2020

I Identify As A Trig Function

... that's what I thought when I saw this from Mark Perry.

"Cos?" The first thing I thought when I saw the top row of pronouns was that this must be a table of trig functions. Reflexively, I figured the next row would be "Si, si, sin, sin, sineself."

At least that would make sense.

I spent some time this morning trying to figure out what a coself was and as near as I can make out, it is a gender-neutral pronoun referring to someone who has absented themselves, err, coselves, from the community for a time. Whatever that means.

Maybe Harry Styles uses coself as his pronoun.

Harry looking simply fab. You go, co!
Not shown: Harry walking through Compton at ten at night in a dress.
Bonus question: Who or what is a Harry Styles?

Aside: When I saw the swooning over Harry's sartorial savvy, I wondered how a young man might fare if he wore a dress on a first date. My guess would be not very well, even in this woke age.

This brought to mind a different question, one I'd like to ask the 'Post commenters.

Have you ever seen a female character in a modern drama who expressed deep regrets at being childless and unmarried at 35 or older?

Surfing around the Interweb Tubes this weekend, reading discussions about marriage and babies, it dawned on me that this common complaint from women isn't represented in our art. As art is supposed to be a reflection of reality, maybe that's one of the reason that modern dramas don't appeal to me. The women characters seem fake and forced.

Wife kitteh loves to watch crime dramas. There are plenty of strong, female roles. Sometimes they're the lead, sometimes they're partners and lots of time they're the coroners or lawyers. They almost never have children or husbands and they never mention it if they feel empty. Here in the real world, I know quite a few unmarried, childless women who are deeply lonely and unhappy.

They use she, her, herself as their pronouns.

They'd never date Harry Styles.

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7 comments:

  1. tim eisele8:45 AM

    "Malicious compliance" is a method of protesting against a rule by following it too literally and enthusiastically, with the intention of making it look ridiculous.

    When I see this long list of "preferred pronouns", I can't help thinking that whoever was ordered to create the list is doing exactly that.

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  2. K T Cat1:23 PM

    Spoken like a true arctan.

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  3. Foxfier6:51 PM

    I know of two examples of a gal upset to be unwed and childless-- Blackwidow, in the Marvel Avenger's universe, and.... k, can't explain her without it being a spoiler, but a major character in the Witcher. In both cases, that they cannot ever have children is a major aspect of their pain-- but they are both lonely, too.

    That I could think of two examples (because I'm actively looking) and they're both outside of the acceptable norm of Respectable Popular Entertainment probably supports the point quite well.

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  4. One Brow6:25 AM

    One of the characters in Collateral Beauty is a woman who is sad about never having children.

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  5. tim eisele7:28 AM

    The thing that is kind of ridiculous about the extended pronouns list is that, once you get past He/She, as near as I can tell they all mean the same thing - no specified gender. I think it's not so much a matter of trying to distinguish fine nuances, as another case of "standards creep"

    https://xkcd.com/927/

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  6. Ohioan@Heart9:23 AM

    Identifying as a trig function absolutely busted me up.

    When I first heard about new pronouns for the ever expanding list of genders, my first thought was, well it's time to find pronouns to refer to a single member of the species homo sapiens sapiens that simply does not refer to gender at all. It took about 30 seconds to decide that such a neuter list of pronouns (which avoids the use of the inanimate 'it' set) could be: ne, nim, ner, nis, nerself (some of these use the he/him conjugation and some using the she/her set). Now that's a set I would insist on at such a woke (& hallucinating) school. And best of all, they could be used to avoid inadvertently insulting anyone who's pronouns are unknown (or simply can't be recalled because there are too damn many to keep them all strait..)

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  7. Foxfier9:28 AM

    So...why not go to the original rule of thumb and figure "in language as in life, the male embraces the female" and recognize "he" as the generic?

    I mean, besides that the whole point of the exercise being that it gives a chance to correct people who did nothing wrong, as a power play. Kind of like reorganizing desks when there's a new boss....

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