A few years ago, “she/her/hers” appended to an email signature might have prompted questions. Today, it’s fairly common.
But the preferred-pronoun movement will not end with email signatures, or with the abrupt conversion of “they” to singular. Flipping through various pronoun and gender-sensitivity guides, one can find some startling new rules for conduct and general admonitions starting to bubble to the surface. I’ve collected a few of them here:
‘Ladies and gentlemen’ is ‘binary assumptive language’
This comes from the University of Maryland. Using context clues, we can infer that “binary assumptive” means bad. The UMD guide lists several terms that apparently fall
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