Pronouns

There's been a time or two when it would have been nice to know pronouns for someone. When you've never met the collaborator and the name is unfamiliar and their language isn't English -- you can chase the odds when you talk about them and say "he", but you'll be (I was) wrong sometimes.

A few years back I attended a conference, and the name badges had a "my pronouns are" section. I wasn't the only one who didn't bother filling it out. In practice, as you can imagine, they were irrelevant. When you're talking to someone, you address them by name or by "you" or just by looking at them when you speak. And nobody bothered to ask what my pronouns were.

Face to face, it's slightly insulting -- perhaps designed to be so -- to demand that a man tell what his pronoun is. "Am I so un-masculine that you can't tell?" I imagine it's just as much or more so for a woman.

Dad-bod, male pattern baldness, 5-oclock shadow -- you figure it out.