The Spivak pronouns 'e/em/eir' are a set of
gender-neutral pronoun
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages, such as Slavic, with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most o ...
s in
English promoted on the virtual community ''
LambdaMOO
''LambdaMOO'' is an online community of the variety called a MOO. It is the oldest MOO today.
''LambdaMOO'' was founded in 1990 by Pavel Curtis at Xerox PARC. Now hosted in the state of Washington, it is operated and administered entirely on ...
'' based on pronouns used in a book by American mathematician
Michael Spivak
Michael David Spivak (May 25, 1940October 1, 2020) was an American mathematician specializing in differential geometry, an expositor of mathematics, and the founder of Publish-or-Perish Press. Spivak was the author of the five-volume ''A Comprehe ...
. Though not in widespread use, they have been employed in writing for
gender-neutral language
Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids reference towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, formation of phrases i ...
by those who wish to avoid the standard terms ''he'', ''she'', or
singular ''they''.
History
The precise history of the Spivak pronouns is unclear, since they appear to have been independently created multiple times.
The first recorded
use of the pronouns was in a January 1890 editorial by James Rogers, who derives ''e'', ''es'', and ''em'' from ''he'' and ''them'' in response to the proposed ''thon''.
[Rogers, James "That Impersonal Pronoun." Editorial. Comp. William Henry Hills '' The Writer'' Boston. Jan. 1890, 4th ed.: 12-13. ''Google Books''. Google. Web. Accessed 31 July 2014]
Coincidentally, Scottish author
David Lindsay (novelist), David Lindsay used the similar forms ''ae'' and ''aer'' in his novel ''
A Voyage to Arcturus'', to refer to non-terrestrial beings "unmistakably of a third positive sex".
In 1975, Christine M. Elverson of
Skokie,
Illinois
Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. It borders on Lake Michigan to its northeast, the Mississippi River to its west, and the Wabash River, Wabash and Ohio River, Ohio rivers to its ...
, won a contest by the Chicago Association of Business Communicators to find replacements for "she and he", "him and her", and "his and hers". Her pronouns ''ey'', ''em'', and ''eir'' were formed by dropping the "th" from ''they'', ''them'', and ''their''.
[Scanned clipping from , published in ] (See
'em.) The article that first reported the pronouns treated them as something of a joke, concluding with the line, "A contestant from California entered the word 'uh' because 'if it isn't a he or a she, it's uh, something else.' So much of eir humor."
[Black, Judie. "Ey Has a Word for It." '']Chicago Tribune
The ''Chicago Tribune'' is an American daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1847, it was formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper", a slogan from which its once integrated WGN (AM), WGN radio and ...
'' 23 Aug. 1975, sec. 1: 12.
Writing in 1977, poet, playwright, and linguist Lillian Carlton submitted a letter to the journal ''
American Speech'' reporting (and arguing against) the invention by "an American professor" (likely Donald MacKay
[ Citing Donald G. MacKay, "Birth of a Word," manuscript, Department of Psychology, University of California at Los Angeles. However, if MacKay ever wrote this manuscript, it does not appear on his CV or anywhere else easily discernable.]) of pronouns based on "the long sound of the vowel e
i".
Although her primary argument against the proposed word is her assertion that English "already
asa perfectly good... word that refers to either sex", namely "one", she also raises the observations that "spoken fast, it comes uncomfortably close to the illiterate hisself...
urthermore ''ee'' sounds too much like ''he'' and would therefore be confusing."
Similar arguments, along with the desire to distance themselves from the male-centric singular ''he'' and derivatives, are still a primary factor in the proliferation of constructed pronouns.
Also in 1977, Jeffery J. Smith, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Stanford University, writing under the pen name "Tintajl jefry", proposed "Em" as "a personal noun-pronoun which in itself gives no indication of sex, age, or number, though these may be shown by its context."
[jefry ic. Tintajl. "Una: The Emerging Language of the World". (Em Institute 1997), pp. 1-4., cited in Lockheed, Marlaine E. ''Curriculum and Research for Equity: A Training Manual for Promoting Sex Equity in the Classroom.'' Rep. no. Classroom Guide. Washington, DC.: Women's Educational Equity Act Program (ED), 1982. pp. 110-11]
/ref> He proposes a vast number of possible uses for "em", including but not limited to the replacement of "the formal Dear, because em is a thou word, a term of respect for all people, bar none... Dear Em Doe is redundant. Em Doe is enough, and, since it is brief; it makes room for given names: Em John Doe, Em Mary and John Doe, or, better, Em Doe John, Em Doe John and Mary."
The May 1980 issue of ''American Psychologist
''American Psychologist'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Psychological Association. The journal publishes articles of broad interest to psychologists, including empirical reports and scholarly reviews covering science ...
'' reported on another study by MacKay, testing rates at which subjects miscomprehended the gender of a subject in textbook paragraphs when written with ''he'' meaning ''he or she'' compared with three epicene pronoun sets: ''E'', ''E'', ''Es'', ''Eself''; ''e'', ''e'', ''es'', ''eself''; and ''tey'', ''tem'', ''ter'', ''temself''.
In 1983, mathematician Michael Spivak
Michael David Spivak (May 25, 1940October 1, 2020) was an American mathematician specializing in differential geometry, an expositor of mathematics, and the founder of Publish-or-Perish Press. Spivak was the author of the five-volume ''A Comprehe ...
wrote the AMS-TeX
AMS-LaTeX is a collection of LaTeX document classes and packages developed for the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Its additions to LaTeX include the typesetting of multi-line and other mathematical statements, document classes, and fonts co ...
manual ''The Joy of TEX: A Gourmet Guide to Typesetting with the AMS-TEX Macro Package '' (1986) using ''E'', ''Em'', and ''Eir''. His set was similar to Elverson's, but capitalized like one of MacKay's sets.
In May 1991, a MOO
A MOO ("Multi-user dungeon, MUD, object-oriented") is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users (players) are connected at the same time.
The term MOO is used in two distinct, but related, senses. One is to refer to th ...
programmer, Roger Crew, added "spivak" as a gender setting for players on LambdaMOO
''LambdaMOO'' is an online community of the variety called a MOO. It is the oldest MOO today.
''LambdaMOO'' was founded in 1990 by Pavel Curtis at Xerox PARC. Now hosted in the state of Washington, it is operated and administered entirely on ...
, causing the game to refer to such players with the pronouns ''e'', ''em'', ''eir'', ''eirs'', ''emself''. The setting was added along with several other "fake genders" in order to test changes to the software's pronoun code, and was left in place as a novelty. To Crew's surprise, the Spivak setting caught on among the game's players, while the other gender settings were mostly ignored.
Other writers applied Elverson's original "th"-dropping rule and revived ''ey'', such as Eric Klein in his legal code for a planned micronation called Oceania. John Williams's ''Gender-neutral Pronoun FAQ'' (2004) promoted the original Elverson set (via Klein) as preferable to other major contenders popular on Usenet (singular ''they'', ''sie''/''hir''/''hir''/''hirs''/''hirself'', and ''zie''/''zir''/''zir''/''zirs''/''zirself'').
Variations
Three variants of the Spivak pronouns are in use, Rogers (1890), Elverson (1975), and LambdaMOO (1991), highlighted in the declension
In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence by way of an inflection. Declension may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and det ...
table below. The pronoun set used by Lindsay (1920) is also in use, although generally not in the context of Spivak pronouns.
The original ''ey'' has been argued to be preferable to ''e'', because the latter would be pronounced the same as ''he'' in those contexts where ''he, him, his'' loses its h sound.
Usage
Spivak is one of the allowable genders on many multi-user dungeon
A multi-user dungeon (MUD, ), also known as a multi-user dimension or multi-user domain, is a Multiplayer video game, multiplayer Time-keeping systems in games#Real-time, real-time virtual world, usually Text-based game, text-based or storybo ...
s (MUDs) and MOO
A MOO ("Multi-user dungeon, MUD, object-oriented") is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users (players) are connected at the same time.
The term MOO is used in two distinct, but related, senses. One is to refer to th ...
s (MUD object-oriented). Others might include some selection of: masculine
Masculinity (also called manhood or manliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with men and boys. Masculinity can be theoretically understood as socially constructed, and there is also evidence that some beh ...
, feminine
Femininity (also called womanliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and Gender roles, roles generally associated with women and girls. Femininity can be understood as Social construction of gender, socially constructed, and there is also s ...
, neuter, either, both, " splat", plural, egotistical, royal, and second. The selected gender determines how the game engine refers to a player.
On LambdaMOO
''LambdaMOO'' is an online community of the variety called a MOO. It is the oldest MOO today.
''LambdaMOO'' was founded in 1990 by Pavel Curtis at Xerox PARC. Now hosted in the state of Washington, it is operated and administered entirely on ...
, they became standard practice for help texts ("The user may choose any description e likes"), referring to people of unknown gender ("Who was that guest yesterday, eir typing was terrible"), referring to people whose gender was known but without disclosing it ("Yes I've met Squiggle. E was nice."), or of course characters declaring themselves to be of gender Spivak. Since 2000 this usage has been declining.
Nomic
Nomic is a game created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber, the of which include mechanisms for changing those rules, usually beginning by way of democratic voting. The game demonstrates that in any system where rule changes are possible, a situa ...
games, especially on the Internet, often use Spivak pronouns in their rulesets, as a way to refer to indefinite players.
Spivak pronouns and gender in virtual communities
In online anonymous situations, Spivak and other gender neutral pronouns can be motivated by avoiding gendered speech that would make divisions in the social group more likely and the group possibly less productive or enjoyable. This contact with genderless pronouns in virtual communities is sometimes a person's first experience and experimentation with presenting their gender in a genderqueer
Non-binary or genderqueer gender identities are those that are outside the male/female gender binary. Non-binary identities often fall under the transgender umbrella since non-binary people typically identify with a gender that is differ ...
or transgender
A transgender (often shortened to trans) person has a gender identity different from that typically associated with the sex they were sex assignment, assigned at birth.
The opposite of ''transgender'' is ''cisgender'', which describes perso ...
manner.
Publications employing Spivak pronouns
Elverson 1975 set (ey, em, eir)
*
*
*
*
"Spivak" 1991 set (e, em, eir)
*
*
*
*
*
*
* the Orion's Arm
Orion's Arm (also called the Orion's Arm Universe Project, OAUP, or simply OA) is a multi-authored online hard science fiction world-building project, first established in 2000 by M. Alan Kazlev, Donna Malcolm Hirsekorn, Bernd Helfert and And ...
universe
*
*
See also
* Generic antecedents
Generic antecedents are representatives of classes, referred to in ordinary language by another word (most often a pronoun), in a situation in which gender is typically unknown or irrelevant. These mostly arise in generalizations and are particu ...
* Ri (pronoun), Esperanto
* Elle (Spanish pronoun)
* Hen (pronoun)
() is a gender-neutral personal pronoun in Swedish intended as an alternative to the gender-specific ("she") and ("he"). It can be used when the gender of a person is not known or when it is not desirable to specify them as either a "she" or ...
, Swedish
* Iel (pronoun), French
* Elu (Portuguese pronoun)
* Gender-neutral pronouns
* Neopronoun
Notes
References
External links
Gender-neutral pronoun FAQ on Aetherlumina.com
{{English gender-neutral pronouns
English pronouns