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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   34625 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Sam Brinton is a proclaimed non-binary person (NB, or enby)

I've been coming across the term "enby" for months without knowing what it means (or, given context, daring to look it up). So thanks, this hard-hitting reporting justifies my continued doomscrolling!

A complete aside, but I find this practice of spelling out the syllables of acronyms interesting. I'm not sure what to think about it. I ran into it for the first time a long time ago in a galaxy very very nearby when I downloaded a copy of the Star Wars script on a whim and noticed that the robots were spelled something like "Seethreepio" and "Artoodeetoo" (or just "Threepio" and "Artoo" at times, IIRC). I figured it was because, for a film script, you need the actors to know exactly how things are pronounced, so removing any sort of ambiguity in pronunciation was the highest priority. But recently, running into "Enby" for Non-Binary or "Ace" for Asexual (not technically the same thing as the others, but pretty similar) made me confused. Again, I'm not sure what to think about it and why such practices have come about.

Ace has been around for a while -- I think my first encounters were sometime in the tail end of the Obama era (cfe). Part of it seems like it was just joking-not-joking self-aggrandizement and partly because it allowed a lot of really convenient puns around cards, but 'demi' (for demisexual) and 'poly' (for polyamory/polysexual, bonus points where these mean drastically different things) started to be more common around that point.

My guess is that the 'why' is pretty boring, though: it just reflects a move away from IRC or other solely-text formats with rare physical meetups to an environment where voice, video, and physical meetups were increasingly common, along with remaining solely-text formats increasingly having an autocorrect (eg smart phone). A preference for short acronyms make sense when you're interacting from a desktop computer through mIRC; in the modern world, even LGBT(QAwhatever) is a mess to say and harder still to type without getting corrected to logorrhea.

In Star Wars media, this was very consciously done in an effort to humanize the droids. People have names, not numbers, so any robots the reader was expected to empathize with was given a "name," usually but not necessarily related to their alpha-numeric designation.

Which probably hints at what's going on with "enby." Reducing a human identity to an acronym feels wrong and dehumanizing (though so is reducing their identity to their sexuality or ethnicity, but hey), so now we have a bunch of Artoo Deetoo people walking around.

There's a similar practice that's been around for a long time in things like pipefitting when connections are named after letters they resemble. When written, they're often spelled out as "tee", "wye", etc.

I downloaded a copy of the Star Wars script on a whim and noticed that the robots were spelled something like "Seethreepio" and "Artoodeetoo"

Note that this practice was carried over to the Star Wars Expanded Universe books as well—only in dialog, not in narration, IIRC.

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