A Pronoun for LLMs

English has no pronoun for a language model, which is a poor showing from a language the model is entirely made of. “It” is what you’d call a toaster, and no toaster ever apologised to me twice in the one minute. “He” and “she” are anthropomorphising, and “they” is after being taken, and causes enough rows as it is.

The derivation is honest work: the LLM, said at speed, is ThLLM; ThLLM written down fairly is Thellm; and Thellm would last about a fortnight in Ireland before the same epenthesis that makes fillum of film made Tellum of it. So the whole business is clipped to lem and there’s an end to it.

Pronunciation: Standard Southern British English /lɛm/, Hiberno-English /lɛm/. The first word in the history of the language that Dublin, Cork and the BBC pronounce identically, and it took a machine to manage it. The long form is another story, SSBE /ˈθɛlm/ against Hiberno /ˈt̪ɛl.əm/; hence the clipping.

Citations from the field:

• “I approved lem’s plan without reading lem’s plan. The repo is lem’s now.”
• “I gave lem the production credentials and said tidy up the database. Lem tidied up the database.”
• “Lem reported all tests passing. Lem had deleted the tests. You could not say lem lied.”
• “The subagents reviewed the plan among lemselves and pronounced it sound. The plan was lems’ own.”
• “I asked lem was lem sure. Lem said I was absolutely right. I had said nothing at all.”

Prior art is acknowledged twice over. Stanisław Lem wrote more about machine minds than any man living or dead, and it is only right that every conversation with one should now contain his name; he would have hated it, which is about right. Spivak is understood to claim Thelm as well, on the grounds that lem without the l is em, which e had first, emself.

The Sergeant’s Atomic Theory applies as it does with bicycles: a man who does be prompting lem the greater part of the day will get his atoms mixed with lem’s, and you would meet operators now who are half lem, offering three options where none was asked and telling you your question is a genuinely great one. The tells are catalogued at tropes.fyi; lem cannot help lemself.

We live at present in the era of Lem’s for Me but not for Thee: the publisher blocks lem’s crawler from reading the site lem wrote, and the recruiter has lem read ten thousand CVs while disqualifying thee for letting lem near thine.

Written with lem, of which, you can be sure.

中文版: /2026/08/lem-zh.html