Yo!

[Dr.Evil]

Here is a snipit from newscientist

 

'Yo' is the word when 'he' or 'she' won't do

05 January 2008

Mark Peters

Magazine issue 2637

ADRIAN QUINTERO is a transgender person with strong feelings about pronouns. "Our language really needs words to acknowledge folks who do not feel included in the gender binary," says Quintero, who uses the pronouns "ze" (or "zie") and "hir", because "they have the freedom to mean something other than, or in addition to, male and female".

 

Quintero's mother, Elaine Stotko, shares this interest. A linguistics expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, she was fascinated when in 2004 a teacher in her Linguistics for Teachers class asked, "Have you ever heard kids using 'yo' when they mean he or she?"

 

About half the teachers taking the course had also heard "yo" used in this way, leading Stotko and Margaret Troyer (one of the teachers) to research this development, which they have now documented in the linguistics journal American Speech, DOI: 10.1215/00031283-2007-012).

 

They found that from at least ...

 

I don't know how many of you have read this artical but if anyone has a subscripion to NS then could yo post it.

 

Well.... Yo is the Tagalog word for come (as in come here) hence a yoyo.

If you see some one you want to speak to down the street and you shout "YO" it effectively means "come here" Any other use of the word is incorrect grammer and punctuation.

 

Besides we already have a singular third person gender-neutral idicitive, it is the word it. It may be offensive sometimes I guess, "is it a boy or a girl" but it does the job. The only thing we will ever need this new word for is self-aware robots and when this happens mabey we should ask them what they want to be called.

[Pangloss]

I disagree with their analysis. "Yo" is a pejorative. And quite frankly I'm not sure we need additional pronouns for every invented gender. They aren't "transgender", they're either male or female. I'm hip to being sensitive to people with psychological disorders, but I don't really see it as a problem in need of a solution.

[Sisyphus]

I'll call individual people whatever they want, but I'm sticking with "he" as the androgynous pronoun. Maybe every ten years or so I'll see how common usage is coming along and reconsider.

[D H]

English has long had an androgynous pronoun: "they". Many notables, including Shakespeare (Comedy of Errors, 1594) and Thackeray (Vanity Fair, 1848), have used "they" in to denote an indeterminate or even single person without reverting to a generic "he", or even worse, the modern "s/he" (yech).

[Realitycheck]

Yo means "Hey".