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By Root 1842 0

never of just one twild or one pairent. (The way to ask that would be, of course, “Do know how to ski?”) Analogously, “they” never denotes just one dividual. “Both of them came to our wedding” is a statement about a duo of pairsons (that is to say, four halves — or four “persons”, in the quaint terminology of those hailing from our world). As for a third-pairson singular pronoun, there is one — “twey” — and it is genderless. Thus “Did twey go to the concert last night?” could be a question about either Karen or Greg (but not about both together, as that would require “they”), and “Have twey had the measles?” could be asked about either Lucas or Natalie, but of course not about both.

Pairsonal Identity in Twinwirld

A young pairson in Twinwirld grows up with a natural sense of being just one unit, even though twey consist of two disconnected parts. “Every dividual is indivisible”, runs an ancient Twinwirld saying. All sorts of conventions in Twinwirld systematically reinforce and lock in this feeling of unity and indivisibility. For instance, only one grade is earned for work that do in school. It may be that one half of is a bit weaker than the other half is in, say, math or drawing, but that doesn’t affect collective self-image; what counts is the team’s joint performance. When a twild learns to play a musical instrument, both halves have their own instrument, practice the same pieces, and do so simultaneously. A bit later in life, when ’re in college, read novels written by pairsons, go to exhibits of paintings painted by pairsons, and study theorems proven by pairsons. In a word, credit and blame, glory and shame, neglect and fame are always doled out to pairsons, never to mere halves of pairsons.

The cultural norms in Twinwirld take for granted and thus reinforce the view of a pair of halves as a natural and indissoluble unit. Whereas in our society, identical twins often yearn to break away from each other, to strike out on their own, to show the world that they are not identical people, such desires and behavior in Twinwirld would be seen as anomalous and deeply puzzling. The two halves of a pairson would scratch tweir head (or each other’s head — why not?), and say to each other, perhaps even in synchrony, “Why in the Twinwirld did twey break apart? Who would ever want to become a halfling? It would be such a semitary existence!”

I mentioned at the outset that 1 percent of births in Twinwirld result in halflings rather than pairsons. Actually, it’s not quite 1 percent — more like 0.99 percent. But in any case, in Twinwirld, a very young pairson will sometimes wonder what it could possibly be like to be born a halfling, and not to be composed of two nearly identical “left” and “right” halves that hang around together all the time, echoing each other’s words, thinking each other’s thoughts, forming a tight team. The latter state seems so absolutely normal that it is very hard to imagine a halfling’s deeply strange, semitary, and impoverished life (often jokingly called a “half-life”).

What about that tiny remaining portion of births, happening just 0.01 percent of the time? Well, there is a curious phenomenon that can occur in pregnancy: both fertilized eggs constituting the zwygote break in half at the same moment (no two knows why it always happens this way, but it does), and as a result, instead of a single twild being born, two genetically identical twildren emerge! (Oddly, the babies are called “identical twinns”, although they are never exactly identical.) The pairents of twinns of course love both of their “identical” offspring equally well, and very often give them cutely resonant pairs of names (such as “Natalie” and “Natalia”, in the case of twinn girlzes, or “Lucas” and “Luke”, for twinn boyzes).

Sometimes twinns feel the need, as they are growing up, to break away from each other, to strike out on their own, to show the wirld that they are not identical pairsons. But then again, some twinns enjoy playing the near-identicality game to the hilt. Roy and Bruce Nabel, for instance, are a typical pair