I have a (kind of) meta question:
What’s up with the “zir” and “zirself” in the text?
I’ve never heard/read that word before and from context I’d infer that it should be “their” and “themselves”.
Would you clear that up?
Thanks for clearing that up.
That was my guess, I was just confused that it suddenly popped up without me ever having heard about it.
Is it popular/well-known? When I googled it, there were no hits for an explanation.
I don’t know, I’ve only ever seen it here and on Yvain’s blog. Ironically, it doesn’t really work for me as far as disrupting intuitive connections and depictions is concerned because it sounds pretty much like the German third person singular feminine pronoun. ;-)
While there have been many attempts at a set of such pronouns and none ever became standard, this is the set I see by far most commonly. Several non-gender-binary-identifying people I know use ze/zir/zirs as their preferred pronouns. They definitely crop up in many more places than just here and SlateStarCodex, as someone else replied, but it tends to be mostly in communities that have a particular focus on gender identity.
I have a (kind of) meta question: What’s up with the “zir” and “zirself” in the text? I’ve never heard/read that word before and from context I’d infer that it should be “their” and “themselves”. Would you clear that up?
“ze/zir/zirself” is an artificial gender-neutral third person singular pronoun.
Thanks for clearing that up. That was my guess, I was just confused that it suddenly popped up without me ever having heard about it. Is it popular/well-known? When I googled it, there were no hits for an explanation.
For more explanation, see Wikipedia.
I don’t know, I’ve only ever seen it here and on Yvain’s blog. Ironically, it doesn’t really work for me as far as disrupting intuitive connections and depictions is concerned because it sounds pretty much like the German third person singular feminine pronoun. ;-)
While there have been many attempts at a set of such pronouns and none ever became standard, this is the set I see by far most commonly. Several non-gender-binary-identifying people I know use ze/zir/zirs as their preferred pronouns. They definitely crop up in many more places than just here and SlateStarCodex, as someone else replied, but it tends to be mostly in communities that have a particular focus on gender identity.
When I see a word I’ve never seen before, I google it. Here you go.