(OPINION) ETH – An admission application was recently submitted for a business school that reportedly offered a whopping 27 alternate pronouns that prospective students could be able to choose from — such as “ey,” “xie,” “hir,” “vis,” and “eirs” in case the apparently outdated “she” and “he” doesn’t suffice. But wait! There’s more!

According to a report from the New York Times, these newly created terms are simply called “neopronouns” — and according to the paper, we ain’t seen nothing thing yet. According to TheBlaze, This piece on Thursday published a nearly 2,000-word article on this very topic, revealing for starters that the phenomenon of using “they” and “them” to describe a single person is becoming normal. But apparently, this is old news.

It turns out that neopronouns — created terms like “ze” and “zir” which gloss over gender — are expanding to include “noun-self” pronouns, which can refer to animals or “fantasy characters,” according to the report. Therefore, the Times reported, one’s pronouns can be “bun/bunself” and “kitten/kittenself” — or even “vamp/vampself,” “prin/cess/princesself,” “fae/faer/faeself.” The paper also said “common slang” (“Innit/Innits/Innitself”) is fair game, too.


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“Many neopronoun users are dead serious, and are also part of online communities that are quick to react swiftly to offenses,” the paper explained. “They are deeply versed in the style and mores of contemporary identity politics conversations.”

More from the Times: “A popular Twitch streamer who goes by AndiVMG recently apologized after jokingly tweeting that her pronouns were “bad/af,” which led many neopronoun users to accuse her of transphobic invalidation of their identities.

AndiVMG did not respond to a request for comment for this article but wrote on Twitter: “It wasn’t meant to mock people who use neopronouns. However I have since educated myself on the matter and spoken to people who use neopronouns and I see why what I said was hurtful.”