#moopsis pronouns

[moopsis]

Mice are eating my grandma's toilet paper stockpile. The little guys are just making a big ol mess and also I can hear thems in the walls at night.

Theys are noisy neighbors and quite disrespectful.

[moopsis]

Honestly, I think we should all just ok stuff more. Like, not even agreeing just saying ok and doing nothing about it.

Like, someone says something stupid? "Ok." Moving on.

Someone insults you? "Ok." or maybe "thank you," that would really throw them off. Then just strike a weird pose for extra psychic damage.

Someone says something controversial or prejudiced in order to start a "debate" where they can try to make themself look smarter than everyone else? "ok" and then just don't react.

Ok and Thank you are truly underrated tools of devastation. When properly placed theys can just completely undermine any attempts cause or escalate conflicts. And honestly? Its way more fun and probably better for your mental health to just confuse people instead of arguing with thems.

[moopsis]

Today I wish to propose new pronouns.

More specifically, I want to persuade as many people as possible to adopt a genderless pronoun system because I think it would be neat, cool, and also good.

My proposition begins with the basic singular and plural "they", with a couple small tweaks.

For plural "they," I propose adding -s to the end of "they" and "them" to create "theys" and "thems." ("Theys are going hiking and theys brought snacks with thems.") The reason for this is to add a subtle distinction between the singular and plural versions. Yes, I'm aware that this will often blend into the surrounding sounds when spoken. I still think it will be useful.

For singular "they," I propose keeping the pronouns themselves the same but make the verbs around thems conjugate to the singular. ("They is eating lunch alone. They is content with their sandwich.") The reason for this is, again, to distinguish between the two "they" pronoun sets.

So the idea here is that there is no gender or personal identity attached to pronouns. They are just neutral reference terms. I believe this is for the best because it takes very little for humans to discriminate against people who are in an "other" category, and any pronouns attached to a specific feature (or identity) of a person are gonna end up being used to categorize. That's not a world ending catastrophe, but I still think its a better option over all to not have people categories baked into our everyday language.

But I'm not done yet.

Because, you see, my proposal above does create a small problem. And that problem is distinguishing between multiple people in a narrative.

"Alex approached Sky and put their hands on their hips."

Did Alex put Alex's hands on Sky's hips? Did Alex put Sky's hands on Alex's hips? Did Alex put Alex's hands on Alex's hips? Did Alex put Sky's hands on Sky's hips?

All are possible. Some of those are very different scenes. We need to be able to distinguish these scenarios from each other more effectively.

So what is the solution? I propose obviative pronouns. What does that mean? Well, according to wikipedia;

In other words, obviative pronouns indicate that a person is less central to the current discussion. This can be based on narrative significance (like a superhero getting the proximate [more central] pronouns and their sidekick getting an obviative [less central] set), or even just on the order in which people appeared in the story.

Because They/Them pronouns are already familiar, that one should be the Proximate set. It wouldn't really change anything significant about the way They/Them pronouns are used, except the singular conjugations described above.

Next, the obviative sets. Multiple. Though many of thems will be rarely used because you rarely have to distinguish between more than two people like this. It will still be useful for further obviations to exist just in case someone wants to tell a wildly confusing story and needs thems all.

1st obviative set: Zey/Zem/Zeir/Zeirs/Zemself

2nd obviative set: Hey/Hem/Heir/Heirs/Hemself

3rd obviative set: Shey/Shim/Sher/Shers/Shimself

4th obviative set and above: Dey/Dem/Der/Ders/Demself

Now also in order for this to work, we need a way to mark which character gets which pronoun set. Context clues could work, but what I think would be more effective is a prefix system. So, when a character is first introduced you use the subject pronoun as a prefix (for example: they-Batman and zey-Robin), then you never have to mark the names like that again in the story. In fact, if context already communicates it the prefixes can be omitted entirely. Its simply a tool to keep things clear.

So back to the example sentence using this obviation system,

"they-Alex approached zey-Sky and put zeir hands on their hips."

That pronoun change makes it clear what is going on in the scene. Arguably, the prefixes could be omitted here because you can assume that Alex would get the proximate set based on them being the subject. But for the sake of demonstration I made sure to keep thems in.

Anyway I'm done talking about linguistics stuff now. I'm gonna call this approach to pronouns "Moopsis Pronouns" because I can. I hope you use thems, it would make me happy to see.