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Alphaday 7 – Season XV

Posted on January 31, 2019January 31, 2019 by Webalpha

Hi Alphas,

Welcome to Alphaday 7, Season XV. We’re already halfway through this season. This is not a culmination to be followed by a downward slope, though, far from it. We’ve reached the top, true, and we’ll stay up here for a while yet, within our tried and tested Alpha framework, and let our writing burst out from there into striking new dimensions. Right?

This Alphaday agenda will nudge you in the right direction. There’s bound to be something that’ll appeal to every one of you – mainly because it’s been put together by our combined efforts and with Alphas in mind. Thank you for your cooperation; without it we wouldn’t be here.

Today’s agenda is as follows:

  • This bulletin from me
  • The results of the Christmas Haiku challenge from Jackie
  • The collated entries for the Frankenstein epistolary challenge from Morgen
  • A call for entries for the 2nd edition of this season’s Open Page from Ros
  • A Writers’ Reads prompt from Morgen
  • A call for Log contributions from Sally

That should keep you occupied for a while, I think.

There’s no special Alpha news. I expect we’re all trying to settle into 2019 and keep up the good intentions.

As for general news I won’t bother you with my opinion of the Brexit mess or whatever. Instead I’d like to mention that I’m now enthusiastically embracing ‘they’ as a singular pronoun. Nothing new in that, I know, but in this gender obsessed era it really is worth accepting and applying singular ‘they’ and abandon other awkward methods to come up with a gender neutral / bigender / agender (looks like a misspelling of what I did above!) pronoun.

Long ago there was an outcry when ‘you’ was used as both a singular and a plural pronoun. Nobody even notices that now. ‘You’ is also the only pronoun to have split its reflexive pronoun seamlessly into singular and plural: ‘yourself’ and ‘yourselves’. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t do that for ‘they’ as well. What’s wrong with ‘themself’? “Someone has locked themself in the bathroom.” I want to see that accepted.

The 1st person pronoun ‘we’ can also be used as a singular pronoun. Sometimes that’s called ‘the editorial we’. I plead guilty to using that when I mention Alpha business. It is of course also called ‘the royal we’ and we all know the one about Queen Victoria: “We are not amused.” You may not know that she actually said: “We’re not enjoying ourself.”

Well, that’s how we amuse ourself here while writing bulletins. If someone finds that daft they’re welcome to express themself via email.

Christine

PS: The spell-checker automatically ‘corrected’ my ‘themself’ word every time. I’ve now added it to my dictionary. What a bigoted lot they are!

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      • The Alpha Christmas Quiz 2013
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    • Group Novel
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    • Longitudinal Exercise #2
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