Does anyone read newspaper comics any more? Does anyone even remember reading newspaper comics? One of the worst of the bunch is a mawkish little one-panel strip called “Love is …,” with a simple formula: a little drawing of a plump, happy, naked couple (minus sex organs), with a caption starting off with the words “love is.” The more popular strips were turned into greeting cards. I actually have an oil painting someone made of the Love is couple that I found in a thrift store for $1.47. The caption: “Love is … letting him win once in a while.”
The strip began in 1970, and the creator turned it over to the current writer and artist in 1975. I have no fucking idea how on earth he can come up with a new “love is” caption every day. His life must be some kind of existential hell. He must spend hours just staring out the window looking for inspiration. Love is … a dog taking a shit, no. Love is … a fat guy waiting for a bus … no. Love is … sitting alone in my underwear wondering what has gone wrong with my life.
Anyway, the reactionary Manosphere blogger Dicipres has decided to do a similar thing with the phrase “feminism is.” Only without the little naked couple. Here are some of his captions-without-pictures.
Feminism is a morbidly obese, sexually promiscuous, short-haired, tattooed, cussing beast whom no man can ever love or trust.
Feminism is a family which hates itself.
Feminism is a line drawn inside your home between you and your wife.
Feminism is a woman furious over ‘rape culture’ and who masturbates while fantasizing being beaten and raped. …
Feminism is a woman who cannot be loved anymore since she hates the domineering man she lusts and sexually despises the submissive man she likes.
Feminism is alimony and every other weekend
Feminism is a son hating his father
Feminism is equality as the only measure for progress of a society …
Feminism is a demographic annihilation due to low birth rates
Yeah. I don’t think any of those are going to work as greeting cards.
And what do these guys have against women with short hair?
Yeah, it’s funny. I gleefully invent and adopt new words all the time, and I think that English’s tendency to absorb, create, and morph new words is really cool. But some new words hit all my pedant buttons, and my back brain goes, “NO! It’s not a Real Word™!” Zie is kind of falling in the latter category, but “bogify” (to make bogus) is totally legit. Weird brain.
From a structuralist linguistics perspective (similar to that of the likes of Saussure and Chomsky, IIRC) , I think the reason that new pronouns aren’t easily accepted as part of a language (at least English) is that pronouns are purely functional words – they don’t have much semantic content. Words like “she/her/hers” and “he/him/his” simply serve to mark the gender of the words they are referring to.
So if there is no functional need for gender neutral singular pronouns like “ze/hir/hirs” and “ey/eir/eirs” (and there isn’t, because technically masculine pronouns are (unfortunately) designated as gender-neutral), then it is very difficult to introduce functional words whose function isn’t actually needed for grammatical purposes. After all, the only real difference between “she” and “ze” is that the latter isn’t gender-specific.
Nevertheless, “ze/hir/hirs” is probably the singular gender-neutral pronoun set most likely to be accepted in English. That’s because it’s phonetically similar to the singular female English pronouns (“she” vs “ze”, “her/hers” vs “hir/hirs”). So it feels relatively more “natural” to use them. It’s why a singular gender-neutral pronoun like “co” feels so awkward and strange – it’s nothing like the other pronouns used in English.
Personally, I have no problem with using whatever pronouns an individual is comfortable with (even if it’s “co”) and I think it’s shitty to deliberately use pronouns they don’t to be used for them, but in general, I think singular “they” and its derivatives are the best singular gender-neutral pronouns to use. It’s already a part of non-standard English – the only people stopping it from becoming part of standard English are super strict grammarians who think that it’s a sin to break any of the Holy Rules of English.
“I think it’s shitty to deliberately use pronouns they don’t to be used for them”
I accidentally the sentence there. That should be: “I think it’s shitty to deliberately use pronouns they don’t want to be used for them”
It’s just a new locution, and filling a need. To set my teeth on edge use “impact” as a verb (instead of influence), or “arbitrator” instead of arbiter. I also prefer obliged to obligated (as in, “he was not obliged to do it”.)
English doesn’t really have hard and fast rules.
But pronouns are more than purely functional. They map to social identities, and serve as markers: of gender, politics, and [in a limited set of forms] class/education.
The use of who/whom is one of the latter. There are those who use the act of correcting it as a very cutting sort of dismissal/putting in place.
So a lot of identity is tied up in the ways we use them; and a lot of people see non-standard pronouns as neither gender, nor politically, neutral.
Oh gods yes, “impact” AAAAHHHH!
Or “disinterested” instead of “uninterested”.
Zie/xie etc feel a bit odd to me partly because they don’t look, or sound, like English (I know, the language has so many adoptions that’s rather silly) – they look vaguely German, like “sie”. There does seem to be a slight awkwardness about them, much like Ms when it was first being used; it sounded odd and slightly clunky. But one gets used to it.
That said, I would prefer a less different-sounding/looking word, if there was one.
Oh, if we’re going to start discussing word mis-uses that irritate us, I’ll be here all night. I curse the name of whoever introduced “agreeance” into common parlance. GRRRrrrrrr.
Also, I’ve lately seen “patron” used as a verb, instead of patronize. That one is really, really bothering me.
Also also, “hate” is a verb. The noun is “hatred”. No citation from any authority to the contrary is going to convince me that the other way around is acceptable. /is stubborn.
It’s funny to observe what irks versus what doesn’t bother me. It’s fairly arbitrary, and seems to be hormonally-influenced.
…How is patron a verb? HOW?
Right? Some blogger said, “We don’t patron that company.” I twitched, and it took everything I had not to derail the thread correcting them (it would have been really rude and derailing in the context of the thread). And then, a few weeks later, I saw it used again the same way. Maybe they think patronize has negative connotations, or something?
I think it really depends on how one looks at English’s syntax rules. Yes, a lot of rules like the notorious split-infinitive rule aren’t hard and fast, contrary to what many grammarians what people to believe, but within a structuralist linguistics understanding of English syntax, one could say that the expletive “it” construction e.g. “It is impolite to make noises while eating” is based on a hard and fast rule of English syntax – namely, the rule that all English sentences must have a subject and a predicate, even if the subject is devoid of meaning (what does the “it” refer to?).
That makes sense, I suppose. I believe there is something similar in Japanese, where singular personal pronouns “watashi” and “boku”, while very similar, still differ due to their sociolinguistic purposes.
And now that I think about it, I think it also makes sense to say that the opposition to new gender-neutral pronouns rests mostly on binarist cultural norms. That is one flaw in Chomskyan syntax: its lack of regard for cultural influence on language. As far as I can tell, Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar portrays natural language syntax as some kind of hard-coded, elaborate system rooted in logical principles, and I think that’s misguided.
Used again by somebody else, I mean, in a different field of interest, so I assume unrelated to each other (although you never know).
Ah, quit being so judgmental. Hate is bad for you!
=P jk
@ Ally 😀
And “wellness”. Fuck I hate that word.
I happen to think Chomsky’s notion of, “deep grammar” is largely bunk, so…
As to the hard and fast on subject predicate, yes, but how those are arranged is really fluid, as is word order, etc.
Which, given that English isn’t a inflected language (with the singular exception of animate pronomial structures) is pretty fucking amazing.
Deep Grammar?
Is that a secret contact whose cover was as a teacher?
That’s true, but consider this:
If I wanted to say “It is raining” in Spanish, I could say “está lloviendo.” That literally translates to “Is raining.” And in Spanish, that’s accepted as grammatical. If I used the same structure in English, most people would stare at me and perhaps even think that English isn’t my first language. And it can’t be compared to a sentence fragment like “Raining” because “Is raining” is a predicate fragment whereas “Raining” is a gerund. If “Is raining” could be considered sentence fragment then the expletive “it” rule wouldn’t really be hard and fast (as subject sentence fragments are technically grammatical, despite what grammarians say) but I don’t think that’s true. Language is cool.
Ally — pointing covers a lot of those, maybe not “is raining”, but if you mumble out “is good” while eating the subject is implied. Likewise pointing and going “your chair” or even “is a puffer fish” is a valid reply to “what’s that?” with the right “that fish?” expression. But yeah, anything with an implied subject can drop the “it”, at least verbally, probably not with just a helper verb as the verb though, I suspect you need an actual verb if you drop the subject.
More interestingly, to me at least, is how Pittsburghese handles helper verbs — they’re optional. Clothes need washed is totally valid. Fish need fed, African violet needs rotated (though that one might be “needs rotating” which is closer to valid in normal English), etc.
Comment done, needs posting ^.^
@LBT: no worries at all, I should have been clearer, a whole bunch of people thought I was trolling!
Yeah… one of the alien concepts that made learning languages harder. Thankfully I learned German before English and that had even more of these. ^^; (Compared to Hungarian that is.)
The “It’s raining.” example would be “Esik az eső.” (“The rain is falling.” OK. “Falling the rain is”, without the “is” as that’s not a helper verb in this language) or just “Esik.” (“Raining.”).
Ally: If I wanted to say “It is raining” in Spanish, I could say “está lloviendo.” That literally translates to “Is raining.” And in Spanish, that’s accepted as grammatical. If I used the same structure in English, most people would stare at me and perhaps even think that English isn’t my first language. And it can’t be compared to a sentence fragment like “Raining” because “Is raining” is a predicate fragment whereas “Raining” is a gerund. If “Is raining” could be considered sentence fragment then the expletive “it” rule wouldn’t really be hard and fast (as subject sentence fragments are technically grammatical, despite what grammarians say) but I don’t think that’s true. Language is cool.
If someone asks me, “how’s the weather outside”, I can say, “it rains”, or “rainy”, or, “crap”, or sunny, or “too damned bright” or “hot”.
I can also say, “rain today”, and a native speaker will understand what I mean (and the implication of that sentence is, “the weather, later in the day, will include rain”. Contextually it may also have an implication that something like an an umbrella, hat, would be a good idea; all of which is completely contextual, and lost in print, though effective in drama).
Simple statements are going to be misleading as to the “hard and fast” rules, because getting down to the kernel of information to be transmitted in minimal cost warps things.
The more complicated things (e.g. how to relate aspects of shifting time, completed/incompleted actions, how parts of speech are distinguished, etc) are unbelieveably fluid in English, and the ability to vary all of that is a huge part of why English is so difficult for a non-native speaker to acquire. The “rules” fail them at every turn.
Hmm. Your first example is an interesting example of pragmatics, one of the strangest topics in linguistics. I have heard people say “is good” in the way you described, although it’s very uncommon as far as I can tell. Nevertheless, I think it’s a significant exception to the rule I mentioned earlier. In fact, it’s possible that certain dialects of English are more likely to have such predicate fragments frequently used.
As for your second example, I take it you’re talking about someone saying “That fish? Is a puffer fish.”, right? I think the intonation of the preceding noun phrase “That fish?” seems to make the noun phrase connect with the predicate fragment in a way that makes the two together sound like a sentence. So I wouldn’t count that as an example – simply because I think the vast majority of English speakers, even the most grammar-obsessed ones, would perceive that example aurally as a valid (but slightly abnormal) English sentence.
I was actually a little excited when I learned about gender neutral pronouns. Singular “they” always sounded clunky to me. I see they/them and my brain goes, “Plural! That’s plural!” One of my little pet peeves, though I’ve read that “they” was originally singular and plural. So it’s entirely my own brain, there, being silly.
We had that kind of sentence structure in WV, too. “Cows need fed.” Pittsburgh is not that far from WV geographically speaking, so, some overlapping of regional dialogue, maybe? Though, these regional dialects sometimes seem almost like different language. It took a long time for me to get acclimated to Pittsburghese and since I’ve been living here I’ve mostly lost my accent. The mountain twang comes out when I’m drunk or tired and people start looking at me l’m from another planet! Still can’t get used to “y’ounz,” though.
Feminism is Soylent Green.
And Soylent Green is… people!
The usage I find curious is an English one: instead of “you’re standing in” it’s “you’re stood in”. I don’t think it’s regional (unless it’s spread) since I’ve heard people from all over the country use it.