Feminist lingo or just an abbreviation?

July 23, 2007 2:42 PM

The abbreviation "yr" as a substitute for "your": is this a feminist thing? Where did it come from?

During my years at a small liberal arts college, I kept running into lots of folks, primarily womyn-with-a-y, who used "yr" instead of the word "your" when typing and printing. Now, I can understand abbreviating words (though by only two letters? overkill, perhaps?) but I'm so intrigued by the fact that this phenomenon seemed to occur primarily with chicks involved in subverting the dominant paradigm of the patriarchy, if you will. Examples: art exhibits involving ladybits, hand-lettered flyers about making your own menstrual pads, chalkings of poems about rape survival... you name it.

I'm a woman who considers herself reasonably liberal and knowledgeable about linguistic stuff, so -- having had contact with lots of feminist ladies over the years -- this continues to puzzle me.

Am I the only person who has noticed this? If you use this yourself, do you do it to signify anything in particular? I've asked this question of someone before, but I think she only did it because she thought it looked cool :P

posted by Madamina to Society & Culture (51 answers total)

I can't give any clue as to the origin of the usage, but there's a song by feminist punk band Le Tigre that's titled "What's Yr Take on Cassavetes?"
posted by demiurge at 2:49 PM on July 23, 2007

Not feminist.
posted by gleuschk at 2:49 PM on July 23, 2007

"Yr" as "your" apparently goes back to at least the 1770s, but there are no citations listed for almost 100 years before the 1960s - here are some citations from the Oxford English Dictionary Online's entry for "Y"; "yr" is under category 7, a list of abbreviations (citation format: year - author - document - citation itself):

1772 J. KNYVETON Jrnl. 12 June in E. Gray Man Midwife (1946) I. 59 The two rooms and the closet will furnish *yr. obdt. with lecture rooms and office. 1811 SHELLEY Let. 3 Jan. (1964) I. 35 Not that I like yr. heroine. 1876 DISRAELI Let. 13 Sept. in R. S. Churchill Winston S. Churchill (1967) I. Compan. I. 54, I earnestly hope that these arrangements may be consistent with Yr Grace's decision to accept the high office of the Queen's Representative in Ireland. 1973 Black World Sept. 84 Ever get tired of people playing with yr life?
posted by mdonley at 2:50 PM on July 23, 2007

The earliest appearance of it that I am aware of comes from Jack Kerouac's "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose."

It was probably more widely popularized by Sonic Youth, though.
posted by dhammond at 2:51 PM on July 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

oops, neustile beat me to it.
posted by dhammond at 2:51 PM on July 23, 2007

I don't have definitive answer, but I know Kerouac used it, as did Sonic Youth. Whoever first started using it probably did so because, as your friend said, that it looks cool, but now has a bit of a pedigree among intellectual/artistic circles, so by using it you associate yourself with them (whereas, abbreviating "your" as "ur" associates you with Missy Elliott).
posted by obvious at 2:52 PM on July 23, 2007

I associate this with punk rock, including the songs Expressway to Yr. Skull by Sonic Youth and "Fuck Yr Fans" by the riot-grrl band Bratmobile (possible feminist connection). According to Wikipedia, yr is common in Beat and indie rock culture, but I couldn't find any specific examples of any examples from the Beat era.
posted by mbrubeck at 2:53 PM on July 23, 2007

Wow, way too slow.
posted by obvious at 2:53 PM on July 23, 2007

there are no citations listed for almost 100 years before the 1960s

That's truly amazing; I've seen it any number of 19th century letters.
posted by Miko at 2:53 PM on July 23, 2007

I've only seen it as an abbreviation, but it may be used in feminist poetry etc because it looks and flows better with other alternatively spelled words.
posted by fermezporte at 2:54 PM on July 23, 2007

Best answer: I went to a women's college, so I know the type of people you speak of. But IANAL, so what I say is totally anecdotal and may be wrong.

I never noted that particular example in an extreme, but there was this whole 'reclaiming grammar' and 'deemphasising self' or 'ignore class and race because it has seeped into our language' thing.

It encompasses lower-case personal pronouns/names or lower-case everything; some random misspellings or abbreviations; a general disregard for punctuation; and many other features that may not be strictly linguistic but do have to do with presentation of word on page, media, and all that communications jazz. Making these 'egalitarian' changes to language was seen as both an artistic statement and a statement of solidarity with less-literate classes and a statement against the Man (who always uses capital letters and is likely at least part Nazi, and we know what the Germans do, don't we.)

Or something. All I know is that lower case 'I' makes me immediately take you less seriously. Because that's what the lowercase I's want, right?
posted by cobaltnine at 2:56 PM on July 23, 2007

Well the obvious reasoning behind "womyn" is to avoid the "men" part of the traditional spelling.

BTW, Le Tigre is hardly one of the first to use the "yr"-isms. Although it's interesting that Le Tigre was cited, instead of Bikini Kill, the band (which Kathleen Hanna was in) that blew open the doors of the Riot Grrl movement to suburban America.
posted by melorama at 2:56 PM on July 23, 2007

but I'm so intrigued by the fact that this phenomenon seemed to occur primarily with chicks involved in subverting the dominant paradigm of the patriarchy, if you will.

Given the old-school roots being vetted up thread, it sounds like you can safely dismiss the correlation as confirmation bias—if you notice something novel to you, you're likely to confound the observation with the context, hence the suspicion that "yr" might be a feminist/womynist shibboleth rather than something that the folks you were observing happened to use.
posted by cortex at 3:00 PM on July 23, 2007

If this makes any sense at all, I've noticed a surprisingly disproportionate amount of GLBT individuals have shockingly bad spelling and other writing skills.

I've always assumed it's because of the amount of time so many of us spent ditching school out of depression or to avoid hostile environments. Look at the drop-out rates for queer youth, it's disturbing.
posted by hermitosis at 3:05 PM on July 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

Zines probably did a lot to popularize "yr". Yr lends itself excellently to second person screeding.
posted by lemuria at 3:06 PM on July 23, 2007

Also, yr was definitely riot grrl-associated, although not riot grrl-coined, so I think you're correct in noticing that it would have frequently occured with "womyn".
posted by lemuria at 3:10 PM on July 23, 2007

I've found a bunch of citations from letters and you could unearth thousands more if you undertook a search, I'd wager. Having spent lots of time with old letters and journals, I don't see it as at all unusual. It does seem to have been more common in the days before the typewriter; but then, so are all the usual abbreviations you find in old letters. Anyone who writes longhand all the time will come up with abbreviations. I expect it's always been informal, not something you'd set in type unless transcribing accurately.

My guess is that this is not a feminist statement, but the affection of an academic who does a lot of primary source work. That stuff doesn't look so weird after a while. I use ampersands myself, and I've often wished we still had the word 'instant' meaning 'in this same month,' which you see all the time. "I rec'd your e-mail of the 21st inst." has a nice efficiency to it.

Citations below to give an example of what I mean.

1859: I have been able to advance yr wishes about the hearing of yr case [letters of Disraeli]

1834: I fear there is no such good news for us or we should have heard from Kindersly, or yr husband...We are talking of moving to Brussels the end of July which (were yr brother willing)

1830: Dear Charles— I send yr book by Francis who promises me to deliver it this evening so I hope you will get it in time— I suppose y r . principal Horse has started before this...[Letters to Charles Darwin]

1849: Inclosed is my check number #361, payable to the Bank of the Interior, for $100, as you request, payable to yr order [Letter by Herman Melville]

1759...You are not unacquainted that yr. Grand father came into the Country after a Regular Study of the Law...
posted by Miko at 3:11 PM on July 23, 2007

Miko, I thought the absence of yr for a hundred years was weird too, but perhaps the OED has its own way of determining which citations get it, and examples from the intervening period didn't meet their standards or were just skipped in the interest of space. No idea.

*pages MeFiLexicographers*
posted by mdonley at 3:21 PM on July 23, 2007

That's why I went to letters, mdonley: I think the OED cites only published sources. If I'm wrong someone will surely be along to correct me, with the quickness.
posted by Miko at 3:22 PM on July 23, 2007

Early to mid 90's thing (meme?), I think!

I associate it with Sonic Youth as well, a la "Kill Yr Idols" but also.. I think lots and lots of ppl got into Sonic Youth either right around when Nirvana was big (1991 the year punk broke) or through riot grrl, stuff on Kill Rock Stars or K punk records. A lot of those bands would've picked it up from Sonic Youth I bet - the phrase "kill yr idols" itself showed up in a lot of places, it was having a moment because Nirvana and a few other bands all much influenced by Sonic Youth got huge and yet they were supposed to stay punk and underground.. so their popularity was awfully fraught..

So you'd see reference to that phrase in SPIN and Alt Press magazines, probably Sassy, in other bands' lyrics, etc. my high school friends (mid 90's) always wrote it that way and I still do it pretty often. I guess maybe a rebellious streak after being raised to use correct grammar and punctuation and spelling at all times.. young people always find ways to mess with language. When I write it there's always that reminder to me of.. we are Bikini kill and we want REVOLUTION! :)
posted by citron at 3:26 PM on July 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

Kim Gordon, rather than Sonic Youth as a whole, is perhaps the reason that this was taken up by Bikini Kill, cool feminist types etc
posted by Flashman at 3:26 PM on July 23, 2007

Lots of poets use it, many of them beats. Waldman, Ginsberg, Creeley, Burroughs, that whole gang. And if they didn't use it in their work, they used it in their personal notes and correspondence. I'd say it's a literary-circle thing, more than a feminist thing.
posted by jennyjenny at 3:27 PM on July 23, 2007

Also, Sonic Youth and Nirvana were big on the Beat writers, Kerouac, Ginsberg, if William S Burroughs ever used it, him too. my guess would be approximately the use of "yr" went from the Beats --> Sonic Youth --> Seattle/Olympia punk rock (Nirvana, Hole, riot grrl). feminism is/was punk and cool, in that context!
posted by citron at 3:34 PM on July 23, 2007

Let's not forget that Kathleen Hanna, of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, appears in the "Bull in the Heather" video by Sonic Youth.
posted by LionIndex at 3:35 PM on July 23, 2007

I've always associated it with Victorian-era letters; it seems very historically feminine to me. (I realize that image may not be supported by evidence, as Miko's examples show, but it has a certain Emily Dickens or Millie Theale flourish to it, to me.) Combined with its use by riot grrl bands like Bikini Kill, it would seem to pull together a lot of interesting strands in women's history, a kind of reclaiming of the Victorian "angel of the house" thing as well as exploding out what that might mean, bringing in the idea of the personal being political.

But all of this is coming from someone who doesn't use it at all, so that's rather off the top of my head.
posted by occhiblu at 3:37 PM on July 23, 2007

Searching closures like "Yr obedient servant" I get 1930, 1915, 1867 (Mark Twain), 1930 (Lovecraft), 1923 (George Eastman), and 1927 (Percy Grainger). I'm going to stop there, but it would be nice to find some more twentieth-century uses.

I'm sticking with my thesis: academic/literary affectation, influenced by frequency of occurrence in centuries of correspondence (and, based on my Googling today, undergoing a resurgence due to chat and IM.)
posted by Miko at 3:53 PM on July 23, 2007

it has a certain Emily Dickens or Millie Theale flourish to it

It seems to be just as common (if not more so) in men's writing, too, but I think there's an important point that your association brings up: That impression might just come from the fact that it was women's studies which brought the diary and letter form to academic attention, and those are the unedited forms in which "yr" is most to be found. Before the countercultural revolution had its impact in academia, only the published, finished, edited works of primarily male authors were thought worthy of serious study. A generation of scholars then unearthed documents that had previously been overlooked as 'private,' 'personal,' or 'domestic' and hence not interesting to academia.

So, while I don't think it's a neologism at all, perhaps this is the reason why it might be more attractive to women's studies professors - they may be more likely to have encountered it, or more likely to want to adopt it as a sign that they are 'privileging' the private, personal communication within intimate spheres of women in generations past.
posted by Miko at 3:58 PM on July 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

It's a very, very common 18th century abbreviation. I've seen it in TONS of primary source materials from that century. It's not new, and 1772 is *way* too late for a beginning.
posted by MythMaker at 4:24 PM on July 23, 2007

Agreed, MythMaker: in searching I found lots of 1600s uses, but ignored them because I was trying to show it continued right up through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
posted by Miko at 4:28 PM on July 23, 2007

There's a track on the new Spoon album called "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb."

I encounter this all the time in music fora. I find it quite vexing.
posted by ludwig_van at 4:42 PM on July 23, 2007

I always thought it was a punk rock thing. I always see it used in zines and punk related literature.
posted by bradbane at 4:46 PM on July 23, 2007

Wow, this thread is a clinic in confirmation bias. Some people are tracing the abbreviation back centuries, which you'd think would put paid to any attempt to source it in womyn's studies or punk, while others go right on tracing it to Kerouac and Sonic Youth. It's a standard abbreviation; the fact that you happen to have first seen it in college or while reading the Beats or whatever is completely meaningless except as a fact about your personal experience.

in searching I found lots of 1600s uses

Could you quote a couple of early ones? This thread is a valuable resource for the history of the abbreviation (already more valuable than the OED), and that would greatly increase its value.
posted by languagehat at 4:55 PM on July 23, 2007

languagehat, while the lineage might be traced back centuries, the fact that it is in current popular usage among particular groups and how it became so (as the youth of the nation certainly didn't get it from 18th century letters) are meaningful, both for understanding its (ongoing) history and for answering the question(s) (is this a feminist thing? Where did it come from? Am I the only person who has noticed this? If you use this yourself, do you do it to signify anything in particular?).
posted by wemayfreeze at 5:03 PM on July 23, 2007

Submit what you have found to the OED. Seriously. They don't always find everything. And they do sometimes use letters or diaries as sources.
posted by litlnemo at 5:04 PM on July 23, 2007

Some people are tracing the abbreviation back centuries, which you'd think would put paid to any attempt to source it in womyn's studies or punk

No one's trying to source it in women's studies or punk, but to explain its popularity and exposure through its use in women's diaries and letters and in punk. Which would be what the question is asking.

On preview: What wemayfreeze said.
posted by occhiblu at 5:11 PM on July 23, 2007

I am a former punk/riot grrrl who frequently (still) uses yr in personal correspondence. To the best of my knowledge, "yr" stems out of typewritten, pre-personal computer, hand-xeroxed zines where many words were abbreviated to save space and typing. Plus, it just looks cooler. I definitely encountered the abbreviation first in zinester culture of the early 90s (which Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile et. al are contemporaneous to). It was also frequently used by Christina Kelly in her monthly Sassy column "What Now" which influenced herds of women now in their 20s and 30s. So, Sassy + punk rock + zinesters = obvious young feminist connection.
posted by alicetiara at 5:21 PM on July 23, 2007

The current vogue, I would think, comes from text messaging, in which any character saved without loss of meaning can be eliminated.

Basically the same principle has always been behind this and other abbreviations. Paper used to be expensive, and you could at least squeeze a few more words on the page by shortening common words like "your".

The "yr" user that popped into my mind was Ezra Pound, in his letters (and probably in some poems as well). A quick scan finds this: [to James Joyce] "You cd. have yr. £ 62 sent on to Brescia, if it cant be postal ordered here." (June 2, 1920)

Those Beats probably picked it up from old Ezra.
posted by beagle at 5:36 PM on July 23, 2007

The original source of the word was not riot grrl/punk/Sonic Youth/Sassy magazine, but this term was absolutely popularized by and common in those genres. It's not confirmation bias: this really happened.

I can dig out zines right now from 1994. All of the riot grrl zines will consistently use "yr" every single time as a substitute for "your". They didn't invent this word, but it's not a coincidence that it showed up there and not in, say, Time magazine. It was a really popular stylistic affection in a certain type of media.
posted by lemuria at 5:47 PM on July 23, 2007

"Yr" would also be the way to spell "your" in Emma Dearborn's method of Speedwriting, developed in 1924.
posted by brina at 7:35 PM on July 23, 2007

lemuria, it was recently popularized by this. It's recentism to think that thing that occurred in the past 20 years are somehow more important to the world as a whole.

Boswell used "yr". Adam Smith used "yr". Franklin used "yr". Very common, almost standard English, and I'm not sure what to make of someone who thinks a bunch of "riot grrls" are more important than three of the leaders of the Enlightenment.
posted by watsondog at 7:51 PM on July 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'm a chick who absolutely can't abide the feminist-ation of language, but I use "yr" all the time in emails and texts for one reason: it's a microsecond saved having to think about whether I need to use "your" or "you're."
posted by CunningLinguist at 8:06 PM on July 23, 2007

Best answer: Gosh.

The question was not whether Bryn Mawr students invented the word "yr" in the last 20 years. The question was whether or not a certain stripe of feminists have commonly used "yr" in their writings.

The answer is yes: riot grrls and punks in the 90s very commonly used this term. Its use was widespread in feminist zines and song lyrics. They did not coin this phrase: they simply used it often. In fact, they used it so often that it got real annoying.

Here's a similar example. The word "gay" is very old. If someone were to ask, "I've noticed that homo-sexuals and Sapphists seem to be using the word 'gay' a lot. Is this accurate?" the correct answer would be "Yes. Homosexuals frequently use this term. Here's where it came from." rather than "The word gay was not invented in the 1920s and to believe so is to support the notion that the depraved mutterings of inverts and the third sex are more important than the sweet poesy of Middle English!"

In summary:
- Yr is a really old word
- Beat poets used this word
- Sonic Youth used this word
- Lots of people really liked Sonic Youth
- Lots of people who liked Sonic Youth were feminists and people in punk bands and people who wrote zines
- They started using this word a lot
- Even though they did not actually INVENT this word
- I hope that this was a useful answer
posted by lemuria at 9:32 PM on July 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

watsondog, you're missing the point. Whatever its previous usage, it became a shibboleth for the riot grrl community at a time when it was no longer in standard use. This isn't about claiming first usage (which is impossible to determine, anyway).

Personally, I suspect there's something more to it than just "Sonic Youth used it" -- that there's a reason they used it or whoever they picked it up from used it, and I'm very curious about that.

Then again, it may remain a mystery, much as the origin of "the whole nine yards" does.
posted by dhartung at 9:39 PM on July 23, 2007

In case anyone cares at this point, I searched the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (but not through that portal) and turned up 22,968 sources. I agree, though, that the long and in previous centuries broad history of the abbreviation "yr" does not tell us the whole story of its adoption in certain late 20th century cultural niches.

I think Miko's explanation is a good one.

Also, the significance of things "looking cool" (as cited by Madamina's acquaintance and alicetiara) is not to be underestimated.
posted by Orinda at 10:15 PM on July 23, 2007

Thank you, Orinda - I'll also just add that zines are a handwritten and unedited form, just like diaries and journals, so it's not surprising that abbreviations like "yr" should be found there.

at a time when it was no longer in standard use.

I'll repeat that it is and has been in standard use if you write by hand a lot. Journalists and stenographers, for instance, never stopped using it.

One song title by Sonic Youth is not really powerful enough to have created this connection, regardless of what Wikipedia seems to think. This is a case in which a Wikipedia entry has been passed over by far too few people with far too little background on the topic, whose word then carries the weight of an authority the entry hasn't earned.
posted by Miko at 5:40 AM on July 24, 2007

I don't even think confirmation bias sums this one up. There needs to be a term that describes interpreting new information with absolutely no preconceptions, background, or relevant input at all.

It's obvious that so many of the above comments are from people who spent five minutes googling on a phenomenon they have never heard of before and splattered their findings all over the page without really understanding what they are saying. And then---and then! endlessly arguing their quickly-formed opinion about the subject as if they were the buck-stops-here authority on 'yr'.

You answered the question yourself, Madamina, in the last line of your question. People use 'yr' instead of 'your' because they think it's cool, and they think that using it, by proxy, makes them cool too. Other cool people, like Sonic Youth, use it, so using it must be the mark of a cool person. Of course, YrMMV.
posted by tjvis at 8:32 AM on July 24, 2007 [1 favorite]

Languagehat, I don't have as much time as I did yesterday so I can't dip back into the Google stream, but I remember that one of the1600s sources was Pepys' diary. There are more.
posted by Miko at 10:15 AM on July 24, 2007

Actually the proper form is y^r, which was the convention for indicating abbreviations until the limitations of early computers put a stop to that.

Consider the Irish last name MacGuire. Scots-Irish followed the English convention and abbreviated this as M^cGuire but computerized name lists have forced this into the form McGuire which is technically wrong.

Also Charles Darwin name was usually written as C^has. These days I have run across people whose given name is Chas.
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 11:21 AM on July 24, 2007

Interesting: "These contractions ought to be avoided as much as possible; unless it be for one's own private use, and where it would be ridiculous to write them at length; as Mr. for Master, Mrs. for Mistress, &c. It argues likewise a disrespect and slighting to use contractions to our betters, and is often puzzling to others." [1800]

MonkeySaltedNuts: I don't know how strongly we can state that using superscript was the "proper" form. It seems to have been more common in British writing than American, especially as Americans became more non-British in the nineteenth century. In handwritten documents at least, superscript seems to have all but disappeared long before the computer age.

As this list shows, it was quite common to abbreviate common names like William (Wm.) and John (Jn.) as well as many other words commonly repeated in documents and letters. Names were very commonly abbreviated, and not always the same way - this list shows "Charles" written variously as "Cha," "Chal," "Chars," "Cha," "Chl," "Chle,""Chles," and "Chls," so it's not as though the abbreviations were always standard. Diminutives of full names often become given names, but not necessarily because of misread abbreviations. I've met a few Beckys and Amys whose full names were not Rebecca or Amelia, for instance.
posted by Miko at 1:51 PM on July 24, 2007

MonkeySaltedNuts is right: the superscript form was very common in eighteenth-century England, and the abbreviation was often underlined, so: y^r. (And it's also really interesting to know that contractions were considered impolite as early as 1800. Thanks, Miko.)

Agreed, though, that eighteenth-century usage has almost precisely nothing to do with zine culture and Mrs. Adam Horovitz.
posted by Sonny Jim at 3:40 PM on July 24, 2007

the superscript form was very common

I agree that it was common, just not that it was the exclusive way it appeared or that you could call it "proper" in an age before standardized writing.

eighteenth-century usage has almost precisely nothing to do with zine culture and Mrs. Adam Horovitz.

Actually, I've been arguing it's an unbroken line. Abbreviatoing "your" as "yr" has been a common feature of the handwritten, informal English language for at least 400 years.
posted by Miko at 8:08 PM on July 24, 2007 [1 favorite]