Yo

Metro came good again (weekdays are looking like a cakewalk already) although as I get more savvy at hunting out those sweet facts, I hope to broaden my sources a bit. But I'm still in those tricky first few days, so this'll do nicely. It concerns the word 'yo', previously known to me to have two meanings: firstly, an exclamation to draw attention to oneself or an item one wishes to comment on i.e. 'yo, I'm waiting outside Superdrug' or 'yo, this sea bass is line-caught'. Secondly, yo, when followed by an apostrophe, can be a colloquialism for 'your', originating from the U.S., as in 'I read yo' thesis' or 'go cry to yo' mama'. However, it appears I am mistaken; Page 20 of today's Metro claims that:

Yo is being used colloquially to refer to 'his or her' and may fall into more widespread use as a word to identify non-gender specific possession.

I suppose an example would be that 'would the owner of a silver Golf, registration S261 THG, please move his or her vehicle from the ambulance bay' would become 'would the owner of a silver Golf, registration S261 THG, please move YO vehicle from the ambulance bay', which certainly has more urgency. It's not clear from the article whether it could also be applied to 'he/she' or as I prefer, '(s)he' ('he/she' just looks a bit tokenistic, like we're letting the ladies in on their own language), as in 'if the player answers correctly, YO moves forward two spaces'. I can't see that working, to be honest.

Apparently there have been a few attempts to bring such a word into the English language, including ter, ip, thon and zie. Which leads me to ask: what's wrong with 'they' and 'their'? That seems to work for me. Yeah, I know it's not grammatically correct, but hey, sue me, language geeks. If any language geeks out there would like to take it further, they can comment below. Ha!