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Now what constitutes a “friend” in Twinwirld? Well, another pairson, natch — sometwo that like a lot. And what about love and marriage? Well, if you’ve already guessed that a pairson falls in love with and marries another pairson, then you are spot on! As a matter of fact, by a crazy coincidence, this very same Karen and Greg that I just mentioned are a typical Twinwirld couple; moreover, they are the proud pairents of two twildren — a girlz named “Natalie” and a boyz named “Lucas”. (To satisfy busybodies, I have to explain that I have no idea which of Karen’l and Karen’r gave birth to either twild, nor which of Greg’r and Greg’l was, so to speak, the instigating agent in either case. No two in Twinwirld ever thinks about such intimate things — no more than we in our world wonder whether the sperm leading to a child’s birth came from the father’s right or left testicle, or whether the egg came from the mother’s left or right ovary. It’s neither here nor there — the zwygote was formed and the twild was born, that’s all that matters. Anyway, please don’t ask too many questions on this complex topic. That’s far from the point of my fantasy!)

In Twinwirld, there is an unspoken and obvious understanding that the basic units are pairsons, not left or right halves, and that even though each dividual consists of two physically separate and distinguishable halves, the bond between those halves is so tight that that the physical separateness doesn’t much matter. That everytwo is made of a left and right half is just a familiar fact about being alive, taken for granted like the fact that every half has two hands, and every hand has five fingers. Things have parts, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have integrity as wholes!

The left and right halves of a pairson are sometimes physically apart from each other, though generally only for very brief periods. For instance, one half of twem might make a quick hop to the grocery store to get something that twey forgot to purchase, while the other half is cooking tweir dinner. Or if twey’re snowboarding down a hill, twey might split apart to go around opposite sides of a twee. But most of the time the two halves prefer to stay close to each other. And although the two halves do have conversations together, most thoughts are so easily anticipated that very few words are usually needed, even to get across rather complex ideas.

Is One or Two Letters of the Alphabet?

We now come to the tricky matter of pairsonal pronouns in Twinwirld. To start off, they have something like our familiar pronoun “I” for an isolated half, but it is written with a small “i”. This is because “i”, much like the suffixes “l” and “r”, is a very rare term used only when extreme pedantic clarity is called for. Far more common than “i” is the pronoun that either half of a pairson uses in order to refer to the whole pairson. I am not speaking of the pronoun “we”, because that word reaches out beyond the pairson who is speaking, and includes other pairsons. Thus “we” might mean, for instance, “our whole school” or “everytwo at last night’s dinner party”. Instead, there is a special variant of “we” — “Twe” (always spelled with a capital “T”) — which denotes just that pairson of which the speaker is the left or right half. And of course there is an analogous pronoun, “” (which, although it looks as though it should be pronounced “double-you”, is actually pronounced “tyou”, like the “Tue” in a British “Tuesday”), used for addressing exactly one other pairson. Thus, for example, back when they were first getting to know each other, Greg (that is, either Greg’l or Greg’r — I don’t know which half of twem) once said very timidly to Karen (on whom twey had a crush), “Tonight after dinner, Twe are going to the movies; would like to join twus, Karen?”

The pronoun “you” also exists in Twinwirld, but it is plural only, which means that it is never used for addressing just one other dividual — it always denotes a group. “Do you know how to ski?” might be asked of an entire family, but