Our catch phrase is on its way.
Dear Fellow Earthlings,
In Installment 94, you encountered the words kee and kerm. These two words are my coinages. I have coined these words in response to the need for a pronoun to replace “he or she” or “they” in sentences such as: “If someone calls me, tell them I will call them back.“or “If someone calls me, tell him or her that I will call him or her back. Here we are talking about a pronoun that does not refer to the gender of the referent -- that is, an epicene pronoun. There have been many efforts to create such a morpheme. With my Jingles background, it is easy for me to create a winner – beause I simply allowed the England-based English community phonome to generate it. Here is how I did it: Since “he” comes from the abdomen (hiy) and "she" comes from the mouth itself (shiy), I deduced that a gender neutral expression for these allomorphs of he/she should be a fricative coming from the area of the soft palate or uvula xiy. However, since x is not a phoneme of English, the velar stop k should be used instead – thus leading to the epicene pronoun “kee’ (pronounced kiy). So kee came to be the nominative case singular gender neutral equivalent of “he or she”. Since he goes to him and she to her in the accusative case, then “kerm” (a blend of him and her) would follow. The final result is the paradigm: he/she becomes kee; him/her becomes kerm; his/her becomes kerm; himself/herself becomes kermself; his/hers becomes kerms. Using kee/kerm/kermself/kerms is so phonetically on target that its use can be mastered in seconds by a native speaker of English. The above problematic sentences are problematic no more: “If someone calls me, tell kerm that I will call kerm back.” And just try saying the following sentence using he/she or they/them! “If someone feels that kee is being discriminated against by someone else, rather than taking it upon kermself to seek out a lawyer, kee can merely tell the person who is bothering kerm to look at kerm face in the mirror and try to imagine how kee looks to the person whose feelings kee has hurt – and to compare them to kerms in the event that kee were to be discriminated against in a similar manner!
Steve Walker, Earthsaver and Jingles Creator
© 2013 Steve Walker, The Jingles-The Japan Foundation for English Pronunciation, Summit Enterprises.