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New post on the Web of Language:
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<div class="">The gender-neutral pronoun thon was word of the year for 1884</div>
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Gender-neutral pronouns have been in the news recently. Last Fall, a trans teacher in a Florida school was removed from their classroom for asking students to refer to them with the gender-neutral title <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; --font-size: 100%; ---font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;" class="">Mx </em>and
the singular <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; --font-size: 100%; ---font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;" class="">they. </em>Two years earlier, when the Diversity Office at the University of Tennessee suggested that teachers make sure
all students felt included by asking them, “What’s your pronoun?”, the state legislature closed the Diversity Office and banned the use of tax dollars to pay for gender-neutral pronouns.</p>
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It’s only fitting then to remember that the gender-neutral pronoun <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; --font-size: 100%; ---font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;" class="">thon </em>was Word of the Year in 1884. Or it would have been, had
we been picking words of the year back then. 1884 was the year that Charles C. Converse announced that he had coined <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; --font-size: 100%; ---font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;" class="">thon,</em> a gender-neutral
pronoun, by blending <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; --font-size: 100%; ---font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;" class="">that </em>and <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; --font-size: 100%; ---font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;" class="">one.
Thon</em>could refer both to men and women, and it would come in handy in cases where gender is unknown, or irrelevant, or where it needs to be concealed (C. C. Converse, “A New Pronoun.” <em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; --font-size: 100%; ---font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;" class="">The
Critic, </em>Aug. 2, 1884, p. 55).</p>
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<div class="">read the full post here: <a href="https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/597154" class="">https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/597154</a></div>
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