Editing Spivak pronoun (section)

== History ==
The precise history of the Spivak pronouns is unclear, since they appear to have been independently created multiple times.

The first recorded<ref name="Dennis Barton">{{cite journal |last=Baron |first=Dennis E. |title=The Epicene Pronoun: The Word That Failed |journal=American Speech |volume=56 |issue=2 |year=1981 |pages=83–97 |jstor=455007 |doi=10.2307/455007 }}</ref> use of the pronouns was in a January 1890 editorial by James Rogers, who derives ''e'', ''es'', and ''em'' from ''he'' and ''them'' in response to the proposed ''thon''.<ref name="James Rogers">Rogers, James "That Impersonal Pronoun." Editorial. Comp. William Henry Hills ''[[The Writer]]'' Boston. Jan. 1890, 4th ed.: 12-13. ''Google Books''. Google. Web. Accessed 31 July 2014. [https://books.google.com/books?id=QQQ-AQAAIAAJ&pg=PA312].</ref> Coincidentally, Scottish author [[David Lindsay (novelist)|David Lindsay]] used the similar forms ''ae'' and ''aer'' in his novel ''[[A Voyage to Arcturus]]'', to refer to  non-terrestrial beings "unmistakably of a third positive sex".

In 1975, Christine M. Elverson of [[Skokie, Illinois|Skokie]], [[Illinois]], won a contest by the Chicago Association of Business Communicators to find replacements for "she and he", "him and her", and "his and hers". Her pronouns ''ey'', ''em'', and ''eir'' were formed by dropping the "th" from ''they'', ''them'', and ''their''.<ref name="Elverson">Scanned clipping from {{cite news | date = 1975-08-23 | title = Ey has a word for it | newspaper = Chicago Tribune | first = Judie | last = Black | page = 12 }}, published in {{cite journal | date = 2011-07-02 | title= The Rise of "Transgender" | author = Guest Blogger | journal = The Bilerico Project | url = http://www.bilerico.com/2011/07/the_rise_of_transgender.php | access-date = 2011-10-27 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20111125135835/www.bilerico.com/2011/07/the_rise_of_transgender.php | archive-date = 2011-11-25}}</ref> (See [[wikt:'em|'em]].) The article that first reported the pronouns treated them as something of a joke, concluding with the line, "A contestant from California entered the word 'uh' because 'if it isn't a he or a she, it's uh, something else.' So much of eir humor."<ref name="Christine Elverson">Black, Judie. "Ey Has a Word for It." ''[[Chicago Tribune]]'' 23 Aug. 1975, sec. 1: 12.</ref>

Writing in 1977, poet, playwright, and linguist Lillian Carlton submitted a letter to the journal ''[[American Speech]]'' reporting (and arguing against) the invention by "an American professor" (likely Donald MacKay<ref name="Martyna">{{cite journal |last=Martyna |first=Wendy |title=Beyond the 'He/Man' Approach: The Case for Nonsexist Language |journal=Signs |volume=5 |issue=3 |year=1980 |pages=492 |jstor=3173588 |doi=10.1086/493733 |s2cid=144075372 }} Citing Donald G. MacKay, "Birth of a Word," manuscript, Department of Psychology, University of California at Los Angeles. However, if MacKay ever wrote this manuscript, it does not appear on his CV or anywhere else easily discernable.</ref>) of pronouns based on "the long sound of the vowel e [[Close front unrounded vowel|i]]".<ref name="Lillian Carlton">{{cite journal |last=Carlton |first=Lillian E. |title=An Epicene Suggestion |journal=American Speech |volume=54 |issue=2 |year=1979 |pages=156–57 |jstor=455219 |doi=10.2307/455219 }}</ref> Although her primary argument against the proposed word is her assertion that English "already [has] a perfectly good... word that refers to either sex", namely "one", she also raises the observations that "spoken fast, it comes uncomfortably close to the illiterate hisself... [Furthermore], ''ee'' sounds too much like ''he'' and would therefore be confusing."<ref name="Lillian Carlton" /> Similar arguments, along with the desire to distance themselves from the male-centric singular ''he'' and derivatives, are still a primary factor in the proliferation of constructed pronouns.{{Citation needed|date=August 2014}}

Also in 1977, Jeffery J. Smith, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Stanford University, writing under the pen name "Tintajl jefry", proposed "Em" as "a personal noun-pronoun which in itself gives no indication of sex, age, or number, though these may be shown by its context."<ref name="Tintajl jefry">jefry [sic.], Tintajl. "Una: The Emerging Language of the World". (Em Institute 1997), pp. 1-4., cited in Lockheed, Marlaine E. ''Curriculum and Research for Equity: A Training Manual for Promoting Sex Equity in the Classroom.'' Rep. no. Classroom Guide. Washington, DC.: Women's Educational Equity Act Program (ED), 1982. pp. 110-113 [http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED235104.pdf]</ref> He proposes a vast number of possible uses for "em", including but not limited to the replacement of "the formal Dear, because em is a thou word, a term of respect for all people, bar none... Dear Em Doe is redundant. Em Doe is enough, and, since it is brief; it makes room for given names: Em John Doe, Em Mary and John Doe, or, better, Em Doe John, Em Doe John and Mary."

The May 1980 issue of ''[[American Psychologist]]'' reported on another study by MacKay, testing rates at which subjects miscomprehended the gender of a subject in textbook paragraphs when written with ''he'' meaning ''he or she'' compared with three [[epicene]] pronoun sets: ''E'', ''E'', ''Es'', ''Eself''; ''e'', ''e'', ''es'', ''eself''; and ''tey'', ''tem'', ''ter'', ''temself''.<ref>{{cite journal |date=May 1980 | first = Donald G. | last = MacKay | title = Psychology, Prescriptive Grammar, and the Pronoun Problem | journal = American Psychologist | volume = 35 | issue = 5 | pages = 444–449 | url = http://mackay.bol.ucla.edu/1980%20pronoun%20problem%20ap%201980.pdf | doi = 10.1037/0003-066x.35.5.444
}}</ref>

In 1983, mathematician [[Michael Spivak]] wrote the [[AMS-TeX]] manual ''The Joy of TEX: A Gourmet Guide to Typesetting with the AMS-TEX Macro Package '' (1986) using ''E'', ''Em'', and ''Eir''. His set was similar to Elverson's, but capitalized like one of MacKay's sets.

In May 1991, a [[MUD, object oriented|MOO]] programmer, Roger Crew, added "spivak" as a gender setting for players on [[LambdaMOO]], causing the game to refer to such players with the pronouns ''e'', ''em'', ''eir'', ''eirs'', ''emself''. The setting was added along with several other "fake genders" in order to test changes to the software's pronoun code, and was left in place as a novelty. To Crew's surprise, the Spivak setting caught on among the game's players, while the other gender settings were mostly ignored.<ref name="CyberSociety 2.0">{{cite book | title = CyberSociety 2.0: revisiting computer-mediated communication and community | first = Steve | last = Jones | date = 1998-07-15 | publisher = Sage Publications | location = Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi | isbn = 978-0-7619-1461-7 | oclc = 808377689 | lccn = 98008984 | url-access = registration | url = https://archive.org/details/cybersociety20re0000unse }}</ref><ref>Moomail from Rog to Lig, 2001-08-26, quoted in {{cite journal | title = Spivak | first = Sue | last = Thomas | journal = The Barcelona Review | issue = 35 |date=March–April 2003 | url = http://barcelonareview.com/35/e_st.htm | access-date = 2011-10-27 }}</ref>

Other writers applied Elverson's original "th"-dropping rule and revived ''ey'', such as Eric Klein in his legal code for a planned micronation called Oceania.<ref>{{cite web | year = 1993 | title = Laws of Oceania | first = Eric | last = Klein | work = Oceania — The Atlantis Project | url = http://oceania.org/laws.html }}</ref> John Williams's ''Gender-neutral Pronoun FAQ'' (2004) promoted the original Elverson set (via Klein) as preferable to other major contenders popular on Usenet (singular ''they'', ''sie''/''hir''/''hir''/''hirs''/''hirself'', and ''zie''/''zir''/''zir''/''zirs''/''zirself'').<ref>{{cite web|year=2004 |title=Gender-neutral Pronoun FAQ |first=John |last=Williams |url=http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/ |url-status=unfit |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140209103126/http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/ |archive-date=February 9, 2014 }}</ref>