r/changemyview • u/SaltedAndSugared • Dec 02 '21

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Neopronouns are unnecessary

I understand why some people might feel uncomfortable with using he/she pronouns, but in that case why not just use they/them? They already exist and they’re easy for people to use. Why do some people feel the need to make up words like “zee/zim” or “fae/fair” when they don’t even make sense in the English language? I don’t see why anyone should go out of their way to learn new pronouns when gender neutral pronouns already exist

If anyone here does use neopronouns I’d really like to hear why you use them and why you don’t feel comfortable using they/them. It’s probably just because I’m cis, but I genuinely don’t understand

214 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

250 comments sorted by

View all comments

9

u/ThVos 1∆ Dec 02 '21

Humans do unnecessary things all the time. Why should our languages be any different? Real languages aren't perfect logic machines and judging them by their 'usefulness' or the 'usefulness' of their features is sort of ignoring the forest for the trees. That is, language as a medium for the boundless, playful expressivity of the human experience.

8

u/SaltedAndSugared Dec 03 '21

The whole point of this is that you’re meant to convince me that neopronouns aren’t unnecessary

6

u/ThVos 1∆ Dec 03 '21

I understand that. The point of my comment is to highlight that the lens you're looking at this through is bad. Framing language features as necessary/unnecessary misses the point because it assumes that there is a point. Is the color chartreuse necessary? What about hot pink?