Gender on Creativity Hacker

A Better Word Than Pibling

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 22:02:12 +0000

Your grandmother and grandfather are your grandparents. Your son and daughter are your children. Your brother and sister are your siblings. But when it comes to uncles and aunts, English gives us no genderless term that includes both.

The closest we’ve got, is an ugly, hatchet-faced word, made by collapsing “parent’s sibling” into… (Wait for it…)

“Pibling.”

Quite frankly, “pibling” sucks. But I’ve got an idea…

Go home, Norsk. You're drunk.

jeff@smithicus.com (Jefferson Smith) — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 07:10:13 +0000

My journey with learning Norsk hit an unexpected landmine today, all because of our new curtains.

Having learned a decent amount of French in school, I’m passingly familiar with the notion of gendered nouns. So the masculine, feminine, and neuter categories in Norwegian weren’t a problem. And learning that many people collapse the feminine and masculine into a single common gender came as a welcome simplification. But then we bought the damned curtains.