Talk:fae

Pronoun

This gets mentioned sometimes as a pronoun (fae, faer, faerself), including in a recent news story which prompted me to look for an entry or uses, but I can find no durable uses of it and very few uses even on the raw web. - -sche (discuss) 22:26, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

Well, lots of phony, pretend words attempting to insert themselves into a closed class of words in the English language aren't durably attested. Good thing, too. Otherwise, second language learners might mistakenly get the impression that the words are legitimate and then go to use them in everyday speech and writing.

To quote some words that you once used when I once advocated for a nonstandard term, "it's downright harmful to non-native speakers" to pretend that terms invented to perpetuate a charade are standard. Tharthan (talk) 23:58, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

Erm, wouldn't {{lb}} and ====Usage notes==== be good enough for these sorts of worries? —Suzukaze-c (talk) 00:05, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Probably, so long as people didn't try to put up a resistance to the label and usage notes. Tharthan (talk) 00:13, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Ha, sorry, I should've been clearer; I'm not proposing to add it. I'm remarking on it because NBC News ran an article recently (and some other outlets have run similar articles, ultimately regarding the same survey) which held it up as an example of a new pronoun people were using (and it has, in turn, become a strawman that right-wingers mock), but I can find spectacularly little evidence of anyone ever actually using it, as opposed to just putting it in lists of pronouns. (In fairness, I didn't search for bare fae, which turned up way too much chaff, but for faer and faerself and faeself.)
It seems like once the idea got planted that someone somewhere was using it, it got copied across various lists, not unlike the miscellaneous -phobia words for fears of clowns wearing the number 13... - -sche (discuss) 00:38, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

I had never heard of it, so naturally it made me roll my eyes. One grows quite tired after people continue to craft pretend words after a while and then demand that they be counted as being valid members of a closed class of words. It was droll at first. Now it's just annoying.

I'm not a right-winger, and never have been, so I don't know what they are doing, nor do I care. I do sympathise with those who are annoyed with conservatives parroting the same talking points and raising alarm bells over nothing, though.

Never heard of a -phobia word for a fear of clowns wearing the number 13, but sounds amusing if such a word does exist. I think that I've seen lists like the one that you mention NBC News was running, but I don't think that I've seen the one that you mention. Tharthan (talk) 00:43, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Spotted this today being used without comment in the WP article on Rivers Solomon. Equinox ◑ 19:04, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

There's a term for neopronouns like this: nounself pronoun. This seems to be the only one that has achieved measurable usage outside of online spaces. A few others might be attestible from Twitter. For the most part, these seem to be nonce coinages that see limited, short-term usage in certain online communities. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 22:00, 20 October 2022 (UTC)