First Lines Fridays #13

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
• Finally… reveal the book

Lines

Pronouns are suddenly sexy. They’re in the air, on the news, all over social media, generating discussion pro and con. Or at least one pronoun is: the third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun. Yes, the pronoun without sex is suddenly sexy. People are asking each other, “What’s your pronoun?”—it’s the new “Hello, my name is _______.” And sometimes they don’t even wait to be asked. They introduce themselves with “I’m Alex. My pronouns are they, them, their.” Or “Ze, hir, hirs.” Or they put it in their profile:
Dr. Andrew Foles @drandrewcomic I’m a linguist and a comic book editor @comicsuniv. I also have experience herding sheep. He/him.
Pronouns are even on TV. In 2019, in a scene from the longrunning BBC police procedural Silent Witness, Nick, a suspect in a series of murders at a transgender support center, asks an investigator, “What gender pronouns are you going to use for me in your report?” The investigator responds, “What would you like me to use?” And Nick replies, “She, please.” The investigator honors that request.

And The Book Is…

The reason why I chose this book is because it talks about the history of pronouns and the issues that it brings.

Alex