The politics of pronouns | BPS
Silicon Valley founders, inventors, and moneymen routinely embrace the first-person plural when they’re really talking about themselves—although they will frame it in such a way that you cannot quite tell whether they are using the royal “we” or imagine a phantom team around them at all times.
Adrian Daub • What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic)
The activist and technologist Pia Mancini once told me about the emergence of a new word in Barcelona: yosotros — a combination of “I” (”yo”) and “We” (”nosotros”) that represents the collective I, the singular We. The term emerged through political movements, but its implications feel bigger. Could this represent a form of collective self? A new p... See more
The Post-Individual
Notice we said “It sounds like . . .” and not “I’m hearing that . . .” That’s because the word “I” gets people’s guard up. When you say “I,” it says you’re more interested in yourself than the other person, and it makes you take personal responsibility for the words that follow—and the offense they might cause.
Tahl Raz • Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
People sometimes ask me if I find it problematic to use they/them as singular pronouns. You’re an English professor, they say. How can you embrace “grammatically incorrect” pronouns?
The notion that nonbinary pronouns, such as the singular “they,” is a new phenomenon is wrong. The Oxford English Dictionary traces back the first written use of a sin
The activist and technologist Pia Mancini once told me about the emergence of a new word in Barcelona: yosotros — a combination of “I” (”yo”) and “We” (”nosotros”) that represents the collective I, the singular We. The term emerged through political movements, but its implications feel bigger. Could this represent a form of collective self? A new p... See more