I probably worded that clunkily. I’m saying if they’re non-binary, Mx is probably ok.
If they consider themselves binary (either a man or a woman but not both and not some mix), they probably prefer the standard titles for their gender. Ms. Jennifer Holcombe, for example.
If I’m misunderstanding you and you mean “what title should people use if gender isn’t known,” I would skip the title altogether. Just like I recommend singular third person they for generic audiences.
“Visit the health services office to pick up your free activity tracker.” “If a student asks about financial aid, direct them to their advisor.” etc.
I don’t know that we’re ever going to get a consensus on one unless it’s paired with a complete removal of Mr, Ms, Mrs, etc.
If y’all let me decide, we can have this English stuff cleaned up in about … ten years sounds feasible? I’m going to need a staff of at least ten for starters.
ETA: I promise you even if I could fix it in the space of ten years, it’d be “broken” in new ways within five. And I kind of like that. Language wants to be broken.
I think we could teach writing and syntax and get kids to want to learn it and really excel at it.
Motivating them in some other way then detention and punishment would be required.
They’d have to be interested. And see the point of learning it. That’s a whole lot of conversations to have on a kid level. To get them interested and engaged. Better to make them do it, and hate doing it, and who cares because they fill out he multiple choice boxes right at the end of the year and it’s literally all that matters anymore in American education.
That’s poop. Stop trying that crap. Lord of the flies in a library would be a better education.
It makes sense the way you describe it, and the way Carmody and Merriam-Webster describe it, as a title someone would voluntarily adopt for themselves. The way Cory describes it in the OP’s first sentence, as “to denote someone whose gender is unknown or nonbinary,” seems a bit too broad. It sounded to me like he was implying that we’d use it to replace entirely the gendered Mr., Ms., Mrs., and Miss, or at least add it to the list for the purpose of avoiding any Pat Riley-esque misgendering awkwardnesses in situations where one doesn’t know which honorific to use.
But yeah, it seems like it’s perfectly cromulent for nonbinary folks who choose to adopt it, but probably not a useful generic catchall for all and sundry.
Speaking of French, I still don’t quite get how so many languages get away with gendered nouns. You’d think that if French was widely spoken in North America, there would be people kicking up a huge fuss about how dare they make maison a feminine noun as if it was the exclusive domain of women, or something. It’s almost as if angry gender politics are the exclusive domain of English-speaking countries.
I can see this point. But I think that we can find other ways to play with the language tool box and we do all the time. I think losing language to that feels restrictive to some of us doesn’t mean losing the playfulness of language in the least - we’ll just find something different to play off of.
All of language is just kludges to the earliest barely meaningful grunts, except for constructed languages, which lose their constructed form the moment people begin learning and speaking them.
As a small child, I might have thought “your highness” was how one addressed unusually tall people.
How about “undermister” for a short gentleman? And, in keeping with the thread, OverMx Whatstheirname might be an appropriate formal appellation for the NBA’s first nonbinary player.
though an etymological site informs me that the -tron suffix was deemed by the coiner to be analogous to neutron–
(why it’s not analogous to positron, electron, etc is left as an exercise for the reader)
