I’ve never much liked “zie” and “hir,” but it seems there’s a whole new way to go about the gender-neutral pronoun: yo.
As in, “Yo likes cookies, genderfucking, and B-movies.”
Works for me.
(via Feministing.)
8 Replies to “Yo! Yo says hi.”
Comments are closed.
I’m not sure Yo-Yo Ma (http://www.yo-yoma.com/) will appreciate it.
yo likey.
well, i like the idea of a gender-neutral pronoun that can be used for everyone. if it’s only used for gender-variant people, then using the same pronoun implies that there’s men, women, and… some group of “others”, who will inevitably be thought of (as we already are) as weirdos.
and, of course, yo is already a pronoun (I) in another widely-spoken language (Spanish), so i can’t not hear it to mean that.
In Belizean creole, they use ‘e’ for she or he, unless for some reason it matters to specify, e.g. to avoid uncertainty on whom you’re referring to. i like that, as it’s close to what we already say, and simply omits the part of the words that result in the gender distinction. i don’t remember what they do for possessive pronouns or indirect object pronouns.
I read the Yo story in a free newspaper I found on a train last week. It made me smile. ‘Yo’ sounds kinda funny, and that will go a long way towards getting rid of some of the awkwardness of new pronouns. I also read a post someone made about using ‘they’. They has a nice handgrenade, they is good at hedgetrimming… that kind of thing. A little funny but a little awkward. I think I could get used to Yo.
I made a comment. Not this one. Where is it?
I moderate comments to prevent spam.
Ah. Sorry, I thought it had vanished into cyberspace. Just ‘submit’ then nothing. I’ll stop spamming your comments now.
Coming in late, but hooray! I like this, too.