I’ve never encountered anyone in real life who has ever commented on or had difficulties with “they” as singular. Backlash tends to be from the more spod-dy posters in threads on transgender related topics or working towards gender neutral solutions.
They always hope for some rule that clears their preference as anything but unpopular opinion.
The only problem I have with M. is that I live in a country that’s bilingual with English and French, and M. is the French abbreviation for “Monsieur” (Mr.), as opposed to Mme and Mlle (Madame/Mrs. and Mademoiselle/Miss).
So I see “M.” come up pretty regularly as a gendered title.
If you don’t have a lot of French-speaking people around, I can see how it’d be nice, but I prefer Mx. to M. for that reason.
Quakers use first name + last name, the idea of using surname only is a bit of a straw man especially as it doesn’t really exist in some languages.
“This is Cory Doctorow.” “Hi, call me Cory”. Where’s the problem?
When I was teaching I positively hated being called Mr. X or Sir. Personally I feel that if you can’t be called by your first name and keep order, there are other more suitable occupations open to you. In one of those apparent paradoxes, in upper class English “Mr.” used to denote professional people who were not, however, one of us - e.g. the family solicitor whose firm had been with the family for generations might be known as Murbles but the new accountant doing the estate books would be Mr. Smith. Superior servants like the butler or the parlourmaid would be known by surname, inferior servants by first name (like children.) It was a complex world to navigate - I was on the fringes of it 40 years ago - and getting the rules wrong immediately labelled you Not One of Us.
We’re better off without it all.
Ah, thanks for the extra knowledge. I fully admit to be English-centric, and have only focused on my own language. I’d be interested to see how they edited Hyperion when it was translated into French.
I’m gonna start using Rev. I paid a good $15 for the privilege, goddammit I’m gonna use it.
Come to think of it, my mailings from the ACLU use that honorific. Until now, nobody else did.
Can we call you “Wing Commander”?
OMG. I used a Dr Strangelove reference in an Aeon.co blog comment, and
NOBODY got it.
And contemporary English is probably the most ‘cludgey’ language around. We’re so peppered with loanwords that all of our phonetic rules have more exceptions than applications. And the cludginess is one of its strengths, honestly.
Then again, maybe this is the answer to the pronunciation woes. Just say “Em” as if it was just a capital letter M with no x after it. This would barely rank in the top 50% weirdest pronunciations in English.
English is basically an ingenious framework for making loan words from other languages work as part of English. Rules? Grammar? We don’t need no stinking rules or grammar!
A friend of mine taught English as a Second Language to adults in Brazil for a while. He made friends with some of his students and went on a road trip with a few of them at the end of the term. On the road trip he revealed to them the true secret to speaking English: “Just say whatever you want and it’s up to the listener to understand you.”
oh what I was trying to endorse is Thorn making a comeback in written English, including on keyboards. Likely never gonna happen though.
and Mx.[so-and-so] = “Mix [so and so]”, from what my trans friends have told me. It’s not super hard.
Wonder if this will ever migrate into the mechanical trades:
Well I’m a fan of the concept as is.
While I found the initial person (from elsewhere) calling for THorn as intergender symbol annoying for very ‘cater to me I don’t care how’ it felt in tone and wording… that did make me look at other discarded letters which had me go 'why did we discard these? You’d save a ton of space and thus ink and paper by having contractive lettering.
I’d love to see some company use alternate naming schemes for their connectors:
“bottom” & “top”
“pitcher” & “catcher”
“pegger” & “peggee”
“inserter” & “receiver”
I could be wrong, but I’m fairly sure only surgeons drop the Dr in favour of Mr (or Mrs or Miss). Physicians retain the title ‘Doctor’ no matter how senior they get.
IIRC, this is inverse snobbery on the part of the surgeons. For a long time (centuries?) they were looked down on as very much the lower end of the medical profession, and now cling to the old distinction in title, originally meant to put them down, as a matter of pride.
How would you represent the “ch” sound in church, cheese, &c.?
Trying to fix a solved problem. “Comrade” dispenses with all distinctions not only of gender but also of marital status and class.
Not in the UK, in my experience, and that’s what I’m writing about.
However, a number of consultants at our local hospital are using firstname lastname.
I’m failing to see the problem with this? 
Not sure I agree with the charming part… but quaint for sure.
Me too. I was pretty certain that the use of Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms instead of Dr was distinctive of surgeons, and this page seems to confirm that. So does this page, though it goes on to say:
Medical qualifications in the United Kingdom have been in an unholy muddle ever since the Medical Act of 1858 when no less than 18 independent medical institutions offered a range of bachelorships, licences, diplomas, memberships, fellowships, and doctorates all officially recognised by the General Medical Council.
And this article from ~10 years ago has the President of the Royal College of Surgeons proposing that the whole “Mr” business be dropped as an archaic form of pretentiousness. I don’t know if that came to anything.
The “h” gets used a lot in English as a kind of escape code, in sh, ch, gh, ph, th. If we abolished or repurposed the letter c, x could be substituted. Personally I’d also get rid of ph, which Italian has very well been able to do, even if it means having to write Sapfo and fotograf, and bring back dh to distinguish thorn and edda.
Dhe xhanges wouldn’t be dhat difficult and it would make things easier for people learning English. We would have to make up our minds about how words like schedule are pronounced, dho.
