"Seems a bit disingenuous to be doing that and math...homework isn't really right but it's close enough, but you're the professional.

"...In other news, have I asked your pronouns?"

"I'm on call right now, not on active observation duty. They've got a bit of automated monitoring. And I know a lot of pronouns but probably you don't speak the languages they're in, why?"

"...Bleah, right.  Sorry, I have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and despite whatever intelligence I have sometimes I still fail my spot checks for things directly in front of my face, or in my ears as the case may be.  I guess that's why at least 5e has Perception under WIS.

"...Why do I want to know your pronouns?  So I can refer to you appropriately in my brain?  And uh - as long as you have the requisite grammar-ish, I'm pretty sure English can take 'em.

"She has a bit of a habit of following other languages into dark alleys and mugging them for spare vocabulary, after all.  's how we got...schadenfreude, zeitgeist...lot of German, actually...fiancé(e) is lifted directly from French including the annoying grammatical gendering...Quite a few Spanish-language food items, though I'm not sure how much that counts...the Anglo-Norman meat versus source animal disjoinment way back in, what, middle English...An absurd amount of mashed-up faux-Latin-faux-Greek science words...

"Anyway!  The pronouns you'd prefer?  Or should I just use your name if refer to you I must?

"...English!  The language where you can do that, and still have it be meaningfully intelligible, despite the order words come in theoretically actially mattering, because...fuck if I know where it came from - I'd bet Asiatic languages, they originated - oh, koan is another bit of English kleptomania and kleptomania is the faux-Greek-faux-Latin again, and the faux in that is just 'false' but in needlessly pretentious French - anyway, at some point somebody decided that theoretically ungrammatical particle orders made things sound wiser, and everyone's just rolled with...ugh, which way around is it?  Verb object subject?  Not a linguist I am, so answer surely I cannot!", she says, failing to not do a Yoda impression.  "For some reason a famous fictional character I am continuing to imitate!"

"Anyway yeah English is several dozen languages in a trechcoat; adding Suaali pronouns - oh, what is the demonym for people from Suaal? - won't hurt me any.  Assuming there isn't some translation-effect that'll vanish later and leave me to realize I was pronouncing them wrong the whole time, but that's only embarrassing."

"I think you should refer to me with whatever existing English pronouns are appropriate, because pronouns are supposed to be convenient and not involve you having to remember more things. But also I think this preference is sufficiently obvious that I wonder if I'm missing something about your question, or if people are just unusually interested in novel linguistics in your world?"

"Pronouns are often metonymic for gender in and of itself, and as someone who has," she...winces?  "Quite a bit of gender-related stuff going on in her life, though now a bit less thanks to Bar...gendering people as they prefer to be gendered is just common courtesy, no matter if it involves me having to invent a way to - to use a fictional example - conjugate a pronoun referent of a specific caste in ways it probably was not intended to be conjugated, from a language that believes one's gender and-or sex to be a matter for only intimate partners at its most liberal and quite frankly thinks that even then might be pushing it.

"That author did a whole...well, any parts of, a conlang, at least - about it; if the character felt that the Correct Signifier was that caste, I'd damn well use that particular pronoun for them even if I had to trip over my own tongue every time.

"...Damn, now I'm really getting distracted by the possibility of lightsabers.  I'm not a Jedi, dammit, I shouldn't get distracted by Jedi-locked things unless I have reason to believe I can actually use the Force.  And I don't!  As much as the glowy laser swords are really cool and also actually plasma."  She doesn't actually pout, but it's a near thing, from the dejected slump she does.

"As for whether my world's some sort of outlier on caring about novel linguistics, I shouldn't think so, but I'm definitely not a statistician with the right sort of data to make that call and I'm probably a couple standard deviations above norm on caring about knowing things in general.  I'm basically a knowledge hoarder, really.  If I could download the entire multiversal Internet, I would, just for the knowledge's sake.

"Don't have that kind of money, nor the requisite storage space, though, so I haven't."

"Ah. I generally expect people speaking languages with grammatical gender to just use the neutral case for me, since there's no obvious way I fit into the humanoid sex system? And I have no particular objection to that, I could signal affinity with a humanoid sex if I wanted to and I don't."

"Gender isn't actually sex, though.

"Like, I know people with genders of 'not even a human' despite their incarnation in fleshly form.

"So it's...

"I don't want you to feel like you have to settle for 'use neuter'; I want the shiniest pronouns you have.  What makes you happiest.

"Maybe that's 'I really have no fucks to give about this', but...I don't actually feel like that's what you're saying?  Am I wrong about that?"

"I don't … if you ask me 'what pronouns make you happiest' I might say 'well, I have fond memories of how excited my friend was about the efficiency of the Draconic pronoun system' but that's not a gender. Pronouns are a shorthand? If I want to feel understood the obvious way to do it is to tell you about me, not to ask you to add an extension to your language. I would find it annoying if you said 'ah, Griffith is a man, because he's a combatant' or 'ah, Griffith is a woman, because she's not a child but her voice is high-pitched and she's beardless', but if you say 'ah, Griffith is probably neither a man nor a woman, because usually plants aren't and it's not like this one has a bunch of obvious evidence to the contrary' that seems just straightforwardly correct in my case. I guess it'd be nice if, in the world where Corin didn't want a beard, he still wouldn't have to have one to be seen as a man by humans, and I like it when systems are good for people, but the system I'm used to is working fine for me."

"Ahh.  Yeah, I think I get that.

"And I do agree with you, Corin shouldn't have to have a beard!  Beards are just the worst!  For multiple reasons!

"In my personal opinion, at least; some quite like them and I don't begrudge them the choice.

"...Also, wouldn't it be more accurate to say most plants are bigendered slash genderfluid on account of having the capacity to produce both stamen and pistil - excuse my probable butchering of the anatomy, but, pollen-generating and pollen-receiving organs?  ...I think that's something that's true, at least, given that the other day I saw an article about a specific tree that had previously presented only one reproductive organ developing chimeric expression of the other reproductive organ?

"But yes, I think I get how your pronouns work."

"Modeling the typical plant at least in Suaal as having an internal experience of a humanoid-like gender including genderfluidity among the humanoid genders is incorrect, I've spoken with them and it's not like that. There's some vocabulary in Sylvan and Druidic for plants by reproductive style, and they don't actually always match that well to mammal-stuff or translate amazingly? Plants have a lot of diversity. But if we're not speaking Druidic or Sylvan or some other language you probably don't speak, I go in a catch-all taxon. I mean, I like being part of a 'species' without a natural reproductive method, I think it has societal-structure advantages, but I don't think you need to bring that up every time you refer to me."

"Yeah, obviously plant culture doesn't really have any reason to be remotely human-legible.  And no, I don't speak anything but English, curse my formative education's lack of follow-through on second language acquisition."

"Anyway, it's nice of you to care about these details but I am actually pretty content in a gendered language with the animate neutral."

"Then they/them/their/theirs/themself it shall be, presumably."

"I'm not actually multiple entities in a relevant-to-personal-identity way?"

"...which is why 'themself'?  People've been trying to get a properly singular gender-neutral pronoun off the ground for a while, but they mostly haven't succeeded.  I can probably find a list of the attempts, though?"

"…they've been trying to get a properly singular gender-neutral pronoun into circulation but they haven't succeeded. I did not consider that as a possible failure mode for a language. Don't the kinds of people who write dictionaries want to avoid seeming provincial?"

"The problem is that English is a consensus-driven frankenlanguage and there are fifteen competing standards, and nobody can stop that."

She shows Griffie a comic.

A relevant xkcd, in fact:

"And then presumably the status-fixated people will either learn all the standards so as to embarrass those who are less up-to-date, or try to get some of the standards deprecated. …but I still don't see how that leads to the go-to gender neutral pronoun being that linguistically awkward. There are a lot of standards for how to arrange silverware for fine dining, but that doesn't mean that if I ask for a fork I'll get a spoon someone clumsily cut 'tines' into."

"It can mean that if you ask for 'a fork' you can get anything from one of those tiny pokey things I think people use for cheese, to an actual pitchfork, and nothing that you'd use for your salad, though.  The problem isn't that people won't learn pronouns, it's that no-one wants to make their preferred neopronoun everyone's pronoun, because that would be very rude.  And singular they has some history behind it; the same thing is why there's no second-person singular.  There's only you."

"And that's why you ask me what pronouns make me happy. Just do something that seems sensible to you, I think that's what I prefer. If the sanest available scheme in your language involves sometimes grouping me in with swarm consciousnesses, I guess that's how your language works. I suppose your languages wouldn't be subject to the same pressures as mine, anyway."

"Yep!" 

After Griffie's done, she shrugs.  "We don't really have swarm consciousnesses, either; there's, like...emergent complexity from bees and ants and such but they're all individuals communicating with eachother.  Bees have bee-language-for-bees that even us humans can sometimes interpret; ants communicate through chemicals.  There was an experiment where someond doused an ant in a chemical dead ants emit - safe for the ant, mind you - and the ant in question basically went 'huh, I smell like I'm dead, I must be dead' and stayed in the corpse pile til it wore off, when the other ants moved it.

"...Also, fun fact, sporks actually exist, though I will admit that I've never seen them be fancy."

"At home, if you can't confidently and accurately talk about genderless people, it suggests that you're some isolated rural farmer – not that people like that deserve to be insulted, but it's a thing – who isn't important enough to have had any interactions with Axiomites or Inevitables or such. My guess is that that's not a pressure on English?"

"We do not have Inevitables, no, and there are additionally political blocs that hold that reproduction is the intended use of a uterus and anything that gets in the way of that must be purged, and other such essentialist bullshit, who are...

"I don't want to give you the impression that they're how most people behave, most people are significantly more accepting, but they've certainly hollowed out a major political party in my home country to puppet around its corpse, and spread poisoned ideas in things pretending to be news reporting.

"It's honestly rather terrifying to think about too much; there's bad historical parallels.

"But that produces significant social pressure against proper recognition of non-binary genders, and furthermore against relationships that are not one man and one woman cohabitating, ideally for the purpose of sexual reproduction.  ...Ugh, they're just horrible and I guess I'm going to have to go questing about it because I can't just...There's too many people I could help, if I found something that would let me.

"...Fuck.  Curse you, overgrown sense of responsibility.  I'm not adventurer material!  Nor am I politician material!  Why am I going to try to meddle anyway!  ...Because someone has to if they want things to not become that, and I can watch the system failing around me in real time, responding to this encroachment by doing almost nothing that it isn't forced to; there's an election coming and it hasn't been preceded by the FBI raiding domestic terrorist cells, it's been preceded by the President who we all know won't reach those assholes saying nothing but words, and poll workers getting issued bulletproof vests."

She sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose in evident frustration.

"The orange clown, whose name I will not speak, spurred on a coup attempt in his last days in office and still walks free at present!  I wouldn't be surprised if what he'd done is post bail, but he hasn't even been arraigned for, outright conspiracy to sedition!  I just don't understand how this isn't being treated like an existential threat to democracy as practiced, because it is one!  Leaving aside my own objections to the ruling party's policies, they're just...not handling this at all, hiding conciliation and appeasement behind procedural bickering while throwing out admittedly welcome voter-bribing that's nonetheless less than useless if the actual fascists successfully pull off their coup next time!"

"Politics is really difficult, yeah. It sounds like your situation has a lot of issues and I wish you luck dealing with things. I don't know if it helps to hear that from my standpoint, 'people responsible for sufficiently important government functions didn't need personal defense stuff' is the aberration, and if these people needing security is shocking to you you're doing well?"

"It helps, but not as much as I'd like, because if the government is that threatened, they can do a lot worse to the people the government's enforcement arms refuse to care about.

"...When those people who're doing the evil shit aren't already government enforcement agents.  That's a whole...thing.

"I suppose it's the power-trip.

"But poll workers are - the support staff of the support staff, not the actual officials."