Pronoun Sets & Present Tense

This post is divided into two sections. Reading the first isn't necessary to understand the second.

Pronoun Sets

I'm sure that all of you are going to accuse me of thinking far too much about stuff that matters far too little, but something that I've wondered about for awhile is which pronoun sets to use by default (if somebody specifies, of course, then anything goes).


It's an issue because gender identity isn't a quality that's obvious from a glance, and not prematurely assigning gender is something that I kind of care about. Especially since it's a pretty important thing for most people (personally I don't really care how you refer to me, just like I don't care if you mispronounce my name, just so long as your intent is respectful and I can grasp that you're referring to me).

So here's my thought process.

He/him/his and she/her/hers are for people that for-sure identity with those terms or otherwise have used them in reference to themselves and made clear that they're cool with being referred to in that manner (it seems clear enough that Will Smith uses the he/him/his set even though we've never had a conversation, frex).

Easy enough.

I decided that it might be useful to make a distinction between "specific person I am referring to, whose pronoun preference I am unaware of right now" and "hypothetical/example person I am referring to for rhetorical purposes, and so on."

I don't want to use they/them/theirs because, while it may be usable for either purpose, it's also a plural and I don't want a lack of clarity on this account.

I like xe/xem/xirs for the first category. It's easy to pronounce and write and won't easily be mistaken for another common pronoun set, either spoken or written. I also like the X in it, which goes nicely with the idea that this is being used primarily for people whose preferred set I'm not aware of yet.

I thought about using ze/zem/zirs instead, which seemed to enjoy wider usage and had a more intuitive spelling. I'd be losing the X, but... is that really worth so much?

(spoiler: it wasn't worth so much, and I've settled on ze/zem/zir)

I would like to use e/em/eir for either category (but especially the second, as with all others listed below, since the first is filled nicely already) but "e" would sound like "he" or "she" too easily and in written form likely look like a typo'd "he," which makes me look like I assume maleness and can't spell/proofread.

1975-Spivak (ey/em/eirs) might work well. I don't know why it was replaced with the modern Spivak form (e/em/eir), because it seems to be the superior version to me.

I would also like to use the Humanist hu/hum/hus but if I pronounce "hu" like the first part of human then it'll sound like "Hugh's." Maybe that's a silly thing to be concerned with, but it's there.

The other flaw with the Humanist form is that it assumes human-ness like he/him/his assumes maleness. That isn't a problem at the moment and I'll be more than willing to adopt something else once we meet our strange-eyed star siblingoids (or make siblings of our own) but I prefer to not adopt a system if I know from the beginning that it will have to be replaced by another system that I could just as easily adopt right now.

Oh, and it might piss off the Otherkin. >:]

Per/per/pers could also work, and that's what I'm going to use right now for the second case.

The other currently existing pronoun sets (jee/jem/jeirs, thon/thon/thons, etc) might work but are usually arbitrary as far as I can see. I want there to be some reason behind the choice. I do like thon as an abbreviation for "that one," though. Just not for general usage.

So in summary:

Ze/zem/zirs: pronoun set used when the referent's gender is unknown.
Per/per/pers: pronoun set used when the referent isn't real, is just a hypothetical being used for rhetorical purposes.

Present Tense

"I believe in the magic and authority of words." René Char

How we speak, the words we use and the way we use them, can influence how we think. I'm not going to enter Nineteen-Eighty-Four Newspeak territory, I'm just saying that words can... carry associations, we'll say. And carry other things.

So let's say that the spirit is eternal. That one who died five hundred years ago is not extinct, simply discorporated. Are we really right to say that that person was or did something in the past tense, where we would use the present tense for a living person? Or should those who ascribe an immortal condition to souls, refer to them as though they were still alive (for such a person believes that very thing)?

Set that aside, however. That's not my main question.

Popular is the idea that time is, in some sense, not real. Time as we commonly conceive of it, anyway. The past is as real as the present. The future has already happened; your conscious experience just hasn't gotten there yet. Everything already is.

(You may now have flashbacks of Slaughterhouse-Five).

So let's go with that. Let's say that you subscribe to that theory. There is an elegance in it that certainly appeals to me, although I can't say that I've made any firm conclusions. It's not firmly concluded in the field of physics, after all.

But we'll say that we subscribe to it for the moment. Or at the very least that we want to play with the idea and treat it as if we are subscribers.

What then? What if... you referred to all things in the present-tense? You might say "last night" or "three days from now" as a point of reference, perhaps, as one referred to "three blocks past the Arby's," but you would not say "will happen" or "did happen."

I am attending Church this past Sunday. I am writing on the computer right now. I am eating breakfast tomorrow: two eggs and some bran flakes. That is what I am eating. Tomorrow.

It could easily be a difficult system. But what would it feel like, just to try it on for size for a week or four?

(What would my stories be like, if I only ever wrote in the present-tense, present-tense characters referring to everything in the present-tense, as if all things are happening and they are only not aware of it all?)

Sometimes I think about things way too much.