that rumbling you hear is the collective souls of the Vikings rolling over in their graves
Posted on 05/01/2013 3:11:27 PM PDT by Maelstorm
No, JK, JK. Everyone's manhood and womanhood and non-binaryhood is still intact, no matter what the conservative gender-apocalypse-mongers are sure to do with this story. You can still be whatever gender you want to be, and embody whatever stereotypes you want—from swaggering alpha douche to limp lily on the fainting couch.
But the ever-progressive nation of Sweden has introduced a new gender-neutral pronoun—hen (neither the masculine han nor the feminine hon)—into its official National Encyclopedia. It's a heartening step in broadening the concept of gender and giving institutional validation to those for whom gender is more complicated than the stiff old male/female dichotomy. (And this is just an aside, but it brings to mind the aggressive challenges to gender in the new album from Swedish band The Knife.)
Here's Slate: Hen was first mentioned by Swedish linguists in the mid-1960s, and then in 1994 the late linguist Hans Karlgren suggested adding hen as a new personal pronoun, mostly for practical reasons. Karlgren was trying to avoid the awkward he/she that gums up writing, and invent a single word "that enables us to speak of a person without specifying their gender. He argued that it could improve the Swedish language and make it more nuanced.
....
(Excerpt) Read more at jezebel.com ...
that rumbling you hear is the collective souls of the Vikings rolling over in their graves
Not at all. This is a concerted effort specifically to blur gender. Read the whole story.
It would be awesome if a time rip occurred and a whole fotila of Historical Vikings found themselves in modern Sweden. They’d put things right. :-)
Gives a new meaning to ‘henpecked.’
Yeah. Sweden is over run with progressive leftist nuts. They don’t allow homeschooling, they don’t allow freeplay or playing with toys cars because it might encourage gender normative behavior because nothing is as horrible as being a normal little boy or girl. Someday these people are going to find out the meaning of going too far.
And so Newspeak marches on. The goal, of course is to make it impossible to express a non-PC thought because the language simply won’t be there. Think about it. If a child is taught that there is only the single word “hen” available to use in speaking and writing, the distinction between the sexes will simply melt away. I don’t see anything good coming from this.
someone should tell them “hen” is female chicken.
Sweeden, the land of the female chicken.
let the jokes and ridicule commence....
Hens are female all the time every time. Roosters would not exist without them.
We’ve had one of those for a while now - “it”.
I can think of a few females in Congress that would be a good candidate for “it”.
I’ve been doing something similar in English myself. If I don’t know whether it’s a she, a he, or an it, I combine the pronouns and call them a She-He-IT (say it real fast).
100%... wouldn't THAT be a hoot!
“In Farmland, ‘hen’ is a female fowl of an older age.”
Yes, and one would think this Swedish peckerhead would know or learn this. Actually, he must be a capon.
The Germans have a derogatory word for men who sit down to pee... “sitzpinkler”, which carries the connotation of something like “pansy”.
Contemporaniously, Saab will soon be reborn as an electric car company.
=> When “hens” fly...!
Somoeone got caught reading a snarky headline and took it literally. The Swedes are creating something in their language that didn’t exist yet. Rather than simply calling a person “it”, they’ve come up with a replacement for Han and Hon that is the equivalent of “it”, but not so impersonal. The article explains that. The lefties at Jezebel actually made the point that conservatives would react the way that many here have.
to think the Vikings were a fighting race, now they’re all pansies
I kind of liked “waitron” myself.
But as far as the new gender pronoun the Swedes have invented...I say they already have a pronoun that most will already be using if someone is neither 'he' nor 'she'.
"It".
Apparently, '1984' was a training manual.
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