Talk:thon

year of origin
The word may have been invented by Converse in 1858, but it doesn't seem to have been significantly publicized until 1884. As a start point for the first expected usage, 1884 is probably more realistic than 1858. See Grammar and Gender by Dennis Baron (ISBN 0-300-03883-6), chapter 10. AnonMoos (talk) 17:02, 29 September 2014 (UTC)


 * P.S. This entry has a template saying that it's being discussed in the Tea room, but when I went there, there was nothing about this word... AnonMoos (talk) 17:02, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
 * See Tea_room/2012/July (archives) and Information_desk/Archive_2011/July-December (archives) for the prior discussions, not bearing on your issue.
 * On your issue, I'd say both dates are of interest. DCDuring TALK 18:01, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Just to throw more weirdness into the mix (without ISBN evidence), experientially, thon has been and is used to mean exactly "that one" as a gender neutral pronoun in rural parts of the north of Ireland for at least three generations before me and its part of my informal rural language, everyone here knows what thon means although mostly rural people use it. Almost exclusively while referring to someone who isn't present (while pointing, eg. "Thon John down the street would know the etymology"). I'm not sure how it was invented in the states in any time in the 1800s. Perhaps it was first suggested as a gender neutral pronoun in actual proximity to a person there. I doubt it was coined there, brought back and used only by people in Irish farming towns in Ulster. 86.146.44.240 00:03, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Neologism?
"Thon" is not a 19th-century neologism. It is a commonly used Scots/Mid-Ulster English word, roughly equivalent to "yon" (as in yonder). A derivative form is "thonder". 100.2.163.251 15:30, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Is this the selfsame word? Leasnam (talk) 15:37, 7 December 2015 (UTC)