Talk:POSSLQ

"POSSSLQ" variant
A similar version is POSSSLQ meaning Persons Of Same Sex Sharing Living Quarters. This has been an acronym used by insurance companies to describe same-sex living arrangements.

"PASSLQ" variant
I've occasionally seen people suggest "PASSLQ" (where the A stands for "appropriate") as a gender-blind version of this acronym. Compared to other suggestions, "PASSLQ" causes the fewest difficulties:


 * 1) It is easier to distinguish from the original acronym, both in speech and in writing; the extra S makes "POSSSLQ" look and sound like a typo, even if the letters are named separately.
 * 2) It is consistent with the original acronym (which doesn't abbreviate the "of" either). A consistent version of the same-sex counterpart would read "PSSSLQ": in addition to the "apparent typo" problem, "PSSSLQ" suggests the word "piss" when pronounced as as an acronym.
 * 3) It does not reveal the first partner's sexual orientation or the second one's gender: the "appropriate" sex for a live-in lover varies from person to person.

--Ingeborg S. Nordén 15:51, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Different POSSLQ Expansion
The version that I have always been familiar with has been 'Person Of Significance Sharing Living Quarters', which is also nicely gender-blind, but I'm not sure when or where it originated. Ghoti (talk) 17:08, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Ambiguous "the term"
Are these two sentences about the same term, as their juxtaposition suggests?
 * The category "unmarried partner" first appeared in the 1990 Census, and was incorporated into the monthly Current Population Survey starting in 1995. By the late 1990s, the term had fallen out of general usage, and returned to being a specialized term for demographers.

Was "unmarried partner" a short-lived term, or has it supplanted POSSLQ? --82.46.155.15 (talk) 06:28, 14 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Think "POSSLQ" -- it had 15 minutes of relative media fame in the 1980s, but a lower level of popular awareness since then. AnonMoos (talk) 13:54, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Ambiguous
Does the term specifically mean an unmarried partner? Or is a spouse a POSSLQ just as well? The article doesn't make it clear. Of the sources, only Dictionary.com comments on the matter; not sure if we can count on this. Furthermore, from that definition, it would seem that a simple housemate (such as in a group of students or friends living together) who happens to be of the other gender is a POSSLQ, which is contradictory with the implication here. — Smjg (talk) 22:22, 11 May 2020 (UTC)