Before Vickis, the earliest I've found so far is 1994 on alt.support.dissociation, where "plural" was occasionally used as a synonym for "multiple." For example, Sapphire Gazelles writes, "being plural is my (our) only perspective so it seems normal to us..." (1994, November 15). Another commenter uses it the same way, while also referring to multiplicity as a continuum: "maybe it's not as simple as either singular or plural, [...] maybe this is another of those continuum things and i'm not on the extreme singular end but somewhere in between" (Gordon, 1994, November 7). Such uses continue through 1997, at least (Vineburg, 1997 November 4). You might want to dig around in the ASD archives to pin down the definition better, though!
As added context to help narrow the dates down, I have some fragmented old multi BBS records from 1992 through January 1995, but there, they only use "plural" in reference to Stephen Braude's "First Person Plural." I haven't properly gone through the Many Voices newsletter archive yet, so that might be worth digging through, to see if they use "plural" before 1994! At some point, I'm considering textually transcribing the whole newsletter kit and kaboodle, but that'll take a lot of work.
I suspect that "plural" was an obvious synonym that may have cropped up in multiple places around the same time. However, I thought that about "singlet" too and I was totally wrong, so maybe I'm wrong about this too!
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Date: 2022-03-01 08:50 pm (UTC)As added context to help narrow the dates down, I have some fragmented old multi BBS records from 1992 through January 1995, but there, they only use "plural" in reference to Stephen Braude's "First Person Plural." I haven't properly gone through the Many Voices newsletter archive yet, so that might be worth digging through, to see if they use "plural" before 1994! At some point, I'm considering textually transcribing the whole newsletter kit and kaboodle, but that'll take a lot of work.
I suspect that "plural" was an obvious synonym that may have cropped up in multiple places around the same time. However, I thought that about "singlet" too and I was totally wrong, so maybe I'm wrong about this too!
--Sneak