#epicenity

Late Modern English period, c.1800-today:

fae/faer c.2013, 13 years ago

nonbinary 1995, 31 years ago

co 1970, derived from Proto-IndoEuropean *ko 56 years ago just like he derived from a variant of *ko, *ki in Old English thousands of years ago

transgender 1965, 61 years ago

laser 1960, see neologisms

1933 Hitler is appointed chancellor in January; "sex publications" are banned in February; a literary purge is declared in April; in May Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science is sacked and book-burned and closed, and Hirschfeld's citizenship revoked; addresses of patients and staff are used for arrest and detention in concentration camps

transsexual 1923 - Hirschfeld coins this to further develop gender-affirming healthcare

robot 1921, 105 years ago

transvestite 1910 - Hirschfeld coins this to begin developing gender-affirming healthcare and issuing legal documents providing protection from police around cross-dressing laws

e/em/es/ems/emself 1890 in response to thon

origami 1880

ze 1864 per senior Oxford English Dictionary editor Fiona McPherson, though often incorrectly dated to 1990s

thon 1858

1810 Lindley Murray reissues his book English Grammar to explicitly decry singular they

Early Modern English period, c.1500-1800:

1795 earliest recorded grammarian condemnation of singular they

1631 compute

1532 first English textbook is published

epicene pronoun ou witnessed in 1500s, documented in 1789 publication

Middle English period, c.1100-1500:

not to be confused with the Middle Ages, c.400-1400s

Middle English pronouns table

c.1450 thou becomes primarily insulting, superseded by you

c.1440 printing press is invented

by 1400 she/her/her/hers/herself

1375 singular they

c.1300s herself

c.1300s a (an epicene pronoun, documented in the nominative, cited in this Supreme Court exhibit)

c.1200 they

c.1150 she

Old English period, c.500-1100:

Old English pronouns table: masculine he/hine/him/his, feminine heo/hie/hine/hine, neuter hit/hit/him/his

so how recent is neo?

how about using neopronouns to mean words created "in the new millenium"/"since nonbinary was coined"? counterpoint: in current practice, we rarely check/know when a pronoun was coined; we're just differentiating Standard Pronouns (taught in grammar class) from "made-up" unpopular "failed" pronouns. and among these we haven't differentiated at all, by decade or century, by scifi for aliens or for humans, by part of a conlang or specifically English... except by "nounself" (usually as The Most Unpopular), and maybe by "historical" (implication: dead. except for the Standard Survivors)

do we want to do eras as in styles, heydays? classical, neoclassical, renaissance, postmodern, revivalist, ..? neopronouns as the aesthetic style of 2010-2020, which can be evoked in the future?

how about using neopronouns to mean since 1900? that leaves out ze (along with e/em, es/em, en, and others), so is that what you mean? careful not to just reify he/she/they/ze, especially if mythologized as derived from she+he

how about using neopronouns to include all Late Modern English? that only leaves out ou and a. consideration: how might this flatten the persistent frequency of coinages (every 25 years or less, sometimes several years in a row, just that we know of!) since c.1850 (after grammarians created the linguistic gap by proscribing singular they starting c.1800)

...i'm sure there's appropriate use cases, and room for differentiation -- for instance, i'm interested in the specific set of "not meant as gender-neutral or as androgynous, meant to resist being reinscribed inside a fundamentally m<-->f spectrum" (largely because i find pronouns like sie, derived from she+he, dysphoric personally)

just. we're doing so bad at situating in historical context, writ large, under the active disorganization of fascism especially. and the stakes are really high for gender deviance.