"if you feel infantilised by the word enby you must also dislike any other abbreviation of nonbinary such as n-b/nby because they're The Same Thing" is a hot take I had to read today please google linguistics for dummies

Yes, enby may have initially been coined as a phonetic spelling of an abbreviation of nonbinary, but sometimes! The meaning of a word changes over time based upon the way people use it!

This can happen very quickly in LGBTQIA+ spaces because we're working rapidly to fill in semantic gaps in our languages where we've previously been erased. It also happens really quickly online

Seeing as enby is a word that originated/was popularised in the online LGBTQ+ space, the evolution of the word's meaning happened very quickly. Within the space of months/years, it began to fill the semantic gap for a nonbinary equivalent of girl/boy. It also became a noun!

(I rarely see other shortened versions like n.b being used as nouns, because they're still used wholly as abbreviations of nonbinary, which is an adjective, not a noun. You can say "an enby" but it would be "a n-b person")

Great! We now have a word for that! But that means "enby" took on infantile connotations that it didn't have before, and this change didn't happen to abbreviations like n-b. So now enby means something different to the word that's its linguistic parent.

Kind of like when a word is adopted into one language from another, but it means something a bit different in the new language.

But because marginalised communities are often infantilised, and this problem is a big one for nonbinary people, the new infantilising connotations of "enby" made it no longer a comfortable term for a lot of people.

Just like how a lot of grown men and women don't like being referred to as "boys" or "girls" especially when this is done as a microaggression motivated by bigotry, intended (consciously or not) to belittle and diminish the person's agency

Saying people can't be uncomfortable with enby if they're not uncomfortable with other abbreviations is 1. Ignorant of linguistics, and 2. Just invalidating the very legitimate reasons people dislike the term??

Nonbinary twt didn't wake up one day and suddenly collectively decide that enby has juvenile connotations, and choose to be offenfed by it. That meaning evolved over time.

Ofc there are plenty of people who like enby, and it's cool to use for someone who you know is okay with it, but it shouldn't be used to refer to all nonbinary people, or someone you don't know is okay with it.

There are plenty of alternatives to "enby" which are not infantilising, and which aren't already used by other communities - some people have said NB shouldn't be used to refer to nonbinary because it also means nonBlack and this can cause confusion

Nby, n-b (my personal preference) and n.b are all short enough to make good alternatives to the long winded "non-binary" for character limit/ease of typing purposes, without the same problems as enby and NB.

Anyway sorry not sorry for the rant but I'm a linguistics nerd, and LGBTQ linguistics specifically are incredibly interesting to me, so seeing people be loud and wrong abt it makes me want to rip my hair out