"I just thought: I wonder if I could get guys called Trevor to reclaim the name?" says Trevor Cunningham. "So I went on LinkedIn and I just looked for Trevors, and I started contacting them." And, having found way more Trevors than he had ever met in his life, Trevor set up AskTrev.com, a site where people can get advice for free from people named Trevor. Such as engineer Trevor Murphy, who explains why he joined this society of Trevors.
Read moreAllusionist 234. No Names
Alexinomia is the aversion to saying people's names. Psychologist Thomas Ditye explains what it means to have this condition - in some cases not even saying your spouse's name during 25 years of marriage - and the research he and colleague Lisa Welleschick are doing to learn more about it.
Read moreAllusionist 155. The Tiffany Problem
The name Tiffany has been around for some 800 years. But you can't name a character in a historical novel 'Tiffany', because people don't believe the name is old. Science fiction and fantasy author Jo Walton coined the term "The Tiffany Problem" to express the disparity between historical facts and the common perception of the past.
Read moreAllusionist 147. Survival: Today, Tomorrow part 2
"It's really good if we can get the changes through here - that can be an inspiration for other other countries or other places in the world," says Þorbjörg Þorvaldsdóttir, chair of Samtökin ’78, the national queer organization of Iceland. In 2019, Iceland passed the Gender Autonomy Act, which added an option for people to register their official gender as X; with it, the country's strictly binary-gendered naming laws were suddenly transformed. Other changes, like a new genderfree pronoun, are catching on; but overhauling a whole grammatically gendered language is no easy undertaking.
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