My preferred pronouns, as I wrote several years ago, are “your” or “his majesty”. Anyone not using them must be punished. Indeed, offenders should be fired from their job. Because there is nothing as important in the world as my feelings.
Your feelings do not matter in the least. Not if your feelings have to do with speaking only of reality. You may look at me and feel, deep in your soul, that I am only a manly man and in no way royal. You may thus feel you should use “he” and “him” when speaking of me. But your feelings are wrong. Mine are right. And mine are right because only my feelings count.
I know you probably don’t agree with me. But, thank the government, at least some do.
Lowering Education
Take the uber-enlightened University of Minnesota. Reports are they are considering a policy that would mandate people use preferred pronouns or lose their job.
The U is considering a new “gender identity” policy that would assure transgender men and women, as well as others, the right to use whatever pronoun they wish on campus — whether it’s he, she, “ze” or something else.
And everyone from professors to classmates would be expected to call them by the right words or risk potential disciplinary action, up to firing or expulsion.
The pronoun rule is just one of the proposed changes in a draft U policy that, advocates say, would bar harassment and discrimination against transgender and “gender nonconforming” individuals. It’s designed, in part, to combat an indignity known as misgendering — when someone is called by a name or personal pronoun they no longer use.
Clever grammarians will have recognized that the newspaper has already transgressed the policy by writing “called by a name or personal pronoun they no longer use.” They. How dare they write they! When, in my case, it should have been “his majesty.”
It’s not my job to worry about how the newspaper would know that it is I, a self-identified emperor, am reading the paper, and therefore must see only articles that use my preferred pronouns. That’s their responsibility. And they neglected that responsibility. I could sue.
Arsenic Sauce
There is a scene in the old movie Arsenic and Old Lace in which Cary Grant calls Edward Everett Horton to arrange for Grant’s brother to be admitted to Horton’s Happydale insane asylum. The reason is that Grant’s brother self-identifies as Teddy Roosevelt.
Horton said, “You have to click here to read the rest.”
Perhaps clever students should decide their preferred pronoun be “Grand high Poobah, to whom only grades of A are given by the sniveling weasels of the faculty.” “Your grand A-ishness” for short.
I should choose “the floccinaucinihilipilificator”. Anyone suggesting I was taking the piss would be fired immediately. Web designers who failed to include it the drop-down boxes on web forms would be sent away for re-education.
Ha Ha! Loved your satire!
The Ivy League universities are capitulating to insanity and will be deemed by history as ‘Happydale’s Insane Asylum’.
L
How about a pronoun that will take an entiere day to say? Should work brillianty in class, never will teachers check whether you made your homework….
“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
“Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
– Bruce Lee
That draft U of Minn. policy is just like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieK1PTXmopE