FAQ

Gender-Neutral Pronouns

This is likely the thing that the largest number of people will have questions about. I.e., what are these "ey", "em", and "eir" words? They are gender-neutral pronouns. For those that just want the quick summary for reading these words, the corresponding gendered pronouns for the gender-neutral pronouns in the first column are given by the expression in the second column; ie, the word in the first column means almost exactly the same as the the expression in the second. (Those readers who just want the quick summary may freely disregard the "almost exactly" issue and simply regard the first and second columns as giving expressions with the same meaning.) [A single random bit from random.org used to select gender order for all "Paired equivalent" entries; i.e., one random bit was chosen to determine which gender came first for all rows at once.]

The third column, the plural cognate, is unnecessary to understand what the correspondence between the gender-neutral pronouns and the corresponding gendered ones, but it is intended to show the derivation of the forms of the gender-neutral pronouns: with the exception of "themselves"/"emself" all of the singular gender-neutral pronouns are formed by simply cutting the "th" off of the start of the plural forms. Refer to John Williams's archived Gender-Neutral Pronoun FAQ for further discussion of gender-neutral pronouns.

Am I Non-Binary?

Yes, I am.

Is That Why I List the Ey-Series As My Pronouns?

Oddly enough, no. I was a user of gender-neutral pronouns years before I would have thought of myself as anything but cisgender. I want to see the English language, at the very least, add a gender-neutral pronoun set; it is clearly needed where the referent of a third-person singular pronoun is variable; e.g., the United States constitution using "he" to refer to "the president". There have been over 40 presidents of the United States; while the antecedent is fixed -- it is the text "the president"--, the referent is variable -- it refers to different people at different times. (The fact that at the time of initial writing of this sentence that all the presidents have used he-series pronouns is irrelevant; the point is about sentence structures of this nature.)

The clear gap for when the referent is variable is not the only case where I find gender-neutral pronouns desirable. One can imagine a case where the referent is fixed and yet gender is unknown; e.g., "Look, you can still see the footprints ____ left in the snow." Unless the person was clearly wearing high heels (and even that is not a guarantee), you have no information about gender of the walker from the footprints. In any event, even when the gender of the referent is fixed and known to the speaker, I don't feel that the language should require disclosure of gender any more that it requires disclosure of race.

As stated before I want the English language to add a gender-neutral pronoun set that is acceptable to use for anyone. (As a matter of fact, I want to see gendered pronouns dropped from the language, but that is a further future goal.) So as one step toward that goal I make it clear that I am comfortable being referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. It was when I realized that I didn't have to disclose that I am in fact non-binary to promote the use of the ey-series that I got a pronoun pin with the ey-series pronouns. I can even wear it in my conservative community and give a true explanation of why I am wearing it without having to disclose that I am non-binary.

My Grammar Errors?

Some of the grammar "errors" on my pages are not errors at all but deliberate choices to ignore the traditional grammar rules. I have not made a list yet of all of my quirks; but aside from the gender-neutral pronouns described above, one other deviation immediately comes to mind: the exclusion of the usual punctuation marks from the inside of quotations; for the reason for that refer to the Hacker Writing Style page of the Jargon File for the explanation of why the vi tutorial does not use the American standard: Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd." [I also had a note here about the dropping of the periods from "i.e." and "e.g." to make "ie" and "eg", respectively, but I am trying to return to the habit of including the periods.]

There are some other characteristics of my writing that are bad habits that I have developed from spending too many years idle; I have not had the influence of having papers graded to prevent my writing style from drifting completely out of sync with standard usage; one phenomenon is my tendency to make what amounts to run-on sentences separated by semicolons rather than commas; you're reading an example of that. Also, the traditional rules occasionally allow for commas to be "promoted" to semicolons when there are other commas in the sentence; I promote commas far more often that the traditional rules allow. At some point, I would like to make a list of my actual choices to ignore traditional usage, but that hasn't happened yet.

Mathematical Conventions

The three unmarked bases of logarithms are shown as follows:

• base 10: log
• base e: ln
• base 2: lg

What is this x_tag_fagricipni_com ...?

This question is for people who have looked at the HTML code for my pages. One would notice the use of <body class="x_tag_fagricipni_com_2011_css_hook-public"> in the source code of all of my pages; this is based on the idea of Tag URIs. One can see the basic similiarity between my tag and that of the standard specified by www.taguri.org; however, at least in part due to the limitations on what characters can appear in a style attribute, I am not following the specification exactly; I have prepended my tag with "x" to indicate that I am using a non-standard mechanism for generating the tag. But you must be wondering what is it for; well, one can create a user stylesheet that overrides author stylesheets, however, it overrides the style for any element that matches the pattern; by labeling all of my web pages with a tag that is extremely unlikely to be used in another site, if one wants to override the stylesheets associated with my web pages only, then one can make the particular rule that one wants to override a descendant of <body class="x_tag_fagricipni_com_2011_css_hook-public"> .