Pronouns in Signatures

I want to reiterate that in academia I never saw anybody with any intellectual weight use email pronouns. Ever. Not once. Pronouns are the purview of either secretaries or academics who can’t get published to save their lives. It takes an effort not to offer productivity advice to colleagues who use pronouns in signatures. Pronouns are a surefire stand-in for “published nothing since 2007”. Everybody knows this and everybody acts sensitively towards the pronoun crowd.

Academics got everybody else to do it but won’t do it themselves because it’s pathetic.

10 thoughts on “Pronouns in Signatures

  1. I have to say I’m really enjoying this massive purge of DEI garbage. We’ve been dealing with increasing authoritarian garbage from the left for over two decades, I’m so glad and relieved to see it all crashing down so quickly. About 15 years late, but better late than never.

    Also, major reason I was glad Trump won. He’s doing fantastic so far.

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    1. It’s curious how calm and indifferent everybody is compared to their reaction in 2020. I think even wokesters are tired of their self-induced hysteria.

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      1. The media has been riling them up so much for so long it must have broken their minds when their bubble burst. It’s a very harsh crash with reality when what you’ve been told for years turns out to be false.

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      2. “even wokesters are tired of their self-induced hysteria”

        If you go with a cycles theory of history…. (esp Turchin’s 50 year cycle) then 2019-2022 was (roughly) like 1968-70 (more or less the peak of national unrest) and 2024 is like 1972 or 1974 by which everybody pretty much calmed down again. There were problems, including some very serious ones but the peak was over. Even the aftermath of Watergate was a lot calmer.

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          1. “I’m glad we are past the peak”

            Past a peak… not sure if it’s the final one. Revolutionary fervor is very hard to maintain and so it usually burns out (and why revolutions are generally not a great idea unless there are clear goals). Wokeness has no possible goals because there will always be a bigger weird around the corner that must! be! normalized!

            I’m pretty sure the Washington establishment is going to try to remove Trump from office though I’m not sure how yet and I don’t think it’ll go anywhere but the Washington establishment is remarkably insular and stupid, so…. they’re probably not done trying.

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  2. In my circles, I do know some well respected (and well-published) academics with pronouns in their signatures. It is also not an uncommon practice to put these on the badges at a conference. Fortunately, it is easy not to include these and I never had anyone asking me any questions about not using them (whether in a signature or on a badge). What is more disconcerting than the pronouns is sitting through some lectures from my colleagues telling people not to name effects/techniques/equations/phenomena by people who discovered them because they were racists/sexists/misogynists/….

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    1. Probably the difference is that I’m in Spanish, and maybe a half of us are Hispanic. You’ve got to speak English from birth to have the capacity to take this stuff seriously.

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