Spivak pronoun

The Spivak pronouns are a proposed set of gender-neutral pronouns in English popularized by LambdaMOO based on pronouns used by Michael Spivak. Though not in widespread use, they have been employed in gender-neutral language by some people who dislike the more common alternatives "he/she" or singular they.

Two variants of the Spivak pronouns are in use, highlighted in the declension table below.

	Subject	Object	Possessive Adjective	Possessive Pronoun	Reflexive
Masculine	he laughs	I hugged him	his heart warmed	that is his	he loves himself
Feminine	she laughs	I hugged her	her heart warmed	that is hers	she loves herself
Singular they	they laugh	I hugged them	their heart warmed	that is theirs	they love themself
Elverson (1975)	ey laughs	I hugged em	eir heart warmed	that is eirs	ey loves emself
MacKay (1980)	E laughs	I hugged E	Es heart warmed
Spivak (1983)	E laughs	I hugged Em	Eir heart warmed
LambdaMOO “spivak” (1991)	e laughs	I hugged em	eir heart warmed	that is eirs	e loves emself

History

In 1975, Christine M. Elverson of Skokie, Illinois, 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 "transgender pronouns" ey, em, and eir were formed by dropping the "th" from they, them, and their.

The May 1980 issue of American Psychologist reported on a study by Donald G. 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, a mathematician-educator, Michael Spivak, wrote an AMS-TeX manual, The Joy of TeX (1983), using E, Em, and Eir. His set was similar to Elverson's, but capitalized like one of MacKay's sets. Writing in 2006, Spivak said:

“

The original pronoun set was not created by me. I think I read about it in a newspaper clipping, perhaps from the Boston Globe, during the time I taught at Brandeis, and I believe it was credited to an anthropologist; later on, when I wanted to use it, I was unable to locate the source. In "The Joy of TeX", I wrote "Numerous approaches to this problem have been suggested, but one strikes me as particularly simple and sensible." I assumed people would figure that I was using a construction I couldn't properly credit, and not consider me so immodest as to praise my own invention (though I guess that was a rather immodest assumption).

”

In May 1991, a MOO programmer, Roger Crew, added "spivak" as a gender setting for players on LambdaMOO, 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 "dismay", 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).

Usage

Spivak is one of the allowable genders on many MUDs and MOOs. Others might include some selection of: masculine, feminine, neuter, either, both, "splat" (asterisk), plural, egotistical, royal, and 2nd. The selected gender determines how the game engine refers to a player.

On LambdaMOO, 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. In recent years (2000 onwards), this usage is declining.^{[citation needed]}

Nomic games, especially on the Internet, often use Spivak pronouns in their rulesets, as a way to refer to indefinite players.

Publications employing Spivak pronouns

Elverson 1975 set (ey, eir, em)

• Carter, CJ (2011-05-26). Que Será Serees: What Will Be, Serees?. CJCS Publishing. ISBN 9780615483047. 
• Klein, Eric (1993). "Laws of Oceania". Oceania — The Atlantis Project. http://oceania.org/laws.html. 
• O'Friel, Morgan (2007). Larkenia's Flaws: Volume 1. Grand Rapids: TheSpindle. ISBN 9780615147536. 

"Spivak" 1991 set (e, eir, em)

• Dibbell, Julian (1999-01-20). my tiny life: crime and passion in a virtual world. Holt Paperbacks. ISBN 9780805036268. http://books.google.com/books?id=SK3VRr7bFVkC. 
• Hess, Elizabeth (2003). Yib's Guide to MOOing: Getting the Most from Virtual Communities on the Internet. Trafford Publishing. ISBN 9781412002905. http://books.google.com/books?id=2l5yrb2rJ9EC. 
• Love, Jane (2000). "Ethics, Plugged and Unplugged: The Pegagogy of Disorderly Conduct". In Inman, James A.; Sewell, Donna N.. Taking flight with OWLs: Examining Electronic Writing Center Work. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0805831711. LCC PE1414.T24 1999. http://books.google.com/books?id=aFKqSzIxCLkC&pg=PA190. 
• Shaviro, Steven (1997). Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism. London: Serpent's Tail. ISBN 9781852424305. LCCN 9668813. 
• Spivak, Michael (1990-04-01). The Joy of TeX: A Gourmet Guide to Typesetting with the AMS-TeX Macro Package (2nd ed.). ISBN 9780821829974. 
• Thomas, Sue (2004-03-31). Hello World : travels in virtuality. Raw Nerve Books. ISBN 9780953658565. http://books.google.com/books?id=4vweAQAAIAAJ. 

See also

• Generic antecedents
• Womyn

External links

• Gender-neutral pronoun FAQ on Aetherlumina.com