Tipsheet

'Jeopardy!' Blasted for Going Woke

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  March 01, 2024 7:30 AM

Monday’s episode of the game show “Jeopardy!” is coming under fire after one of the clues presented involved “neopronouns.”

After super champ Cris Pannullo selected a $600 clue in the category about parts of speech, host Ken Jennings said, “xem, xyrs, xemself.”

“What are pronouns?” the contestant responded.

“Those are pronouns,” host Ken Jennings replied. “Neopronouns.”

Leave it to The New York Times to have an explainer piece on what they are: 

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A neopronoun can be a word created to serve as a pronoun without expressing gender, like “ze” and “zir.”

A neopronoun can also be a so-called “noun-self pronoun,” in which a pre-existing word is drafted into use as a pronoun. Noun-self pronouns can refer to animals — so your pronouns can be “bun/bunself” and “kitten/kittenself.” Others refer to fantasy characters — “vamp/vampself,” “prin/cess/princesself,” “fae/faer/faeself” — or even just common slang, like “Innit/Innits/Innitself.”

How prevalent are neopronouns?

Not very — yet.

A recent survey of pronoun use among 40,000 L.G.B.T.Q. young people by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing suicide among queer and trans youth, found that one-quarter of them used nonbinary pronouns. (Participants were recruited from late 2019 through early 2020 by ads on social media.) Most said they used common pronouns like “he,” “she” and “they.”

Just 4 percent said they used neopronouns, including “ze/zir,” and “fae/faer,” often in combination with other pronouns.(NYT)

Angry fans took to social media to express their outrage at the post-Alex Trebek show.