Orcasional Musings | Grandpa said, “Take my grammar. Please!”

||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

Truthfully, I didn’t know, one way or the other. The culprit could’ve been a red-eyed, green skinned, long-fanged Martian of that planet’s infamous 14th gender. You know: The ones who require a minimum of five of them working together, in order to reproduce.

I used “he” because the English language no longer has a neuter gender from which to construct an impartial general case. I believe that there was a neuter gender, long, long ago, but nowadays we have masculine and feminine, and that’s it. If you want to use a gender-neutral pronoun, you’re just plum out of luck, or you’ll have to switch to German, which still has a neuter form, or to French, which retains some vestiges of the one it used to have.

Not too long ago, the entire world was a decidedly masculine place. That caused a whole lot of feminine and neuter grammatical constructions to die out, leaving the field to the male-dominated linguistic forms of the gender-in-charge. In the English language, and in many others as well, “he” and “his” stayed in use as the general case for hundreds of years. And then, upon the advent of two closely spaced, man devouring world wars, we got Rosie the Riveter.

Women were essential to the manufacturing excesses which won those wars for us, and, once women realized their economic value and thereby began to exercise their political power, the masculine social norms and masculine language forms didn’t stand a chance. They began changing right away, starting with the vote in 1920, and gender-dominance adjustments are still going on today.

But, as yet, we don’t have gender-neutral pronouns. Some writers and public speakers try to use awkward work-arounds. One is “they” used in a singular sense. Another is the combined “he and she,” or the very strange looking “he/she,” or even “he/she/it.” A writer friend says that, while the singular “they” is ghastly enough, it’s not nearly as ghastly as seeing “he or she” for the fifth time in the same paragraph. She is absolutely correct, and we need a better solution to the problem.

Years and years ago, during the time that I owned a leather-craft shop in Los Angeles, I knew a radical lesbian feminist who called herself Varda, who edited and published a radical feminist newspaper. Varda was as fascinated by the pronoun problem as I was, and she invented the neologist indeterminate pronoun “Ve,” which she insisted upon using in her newspaper. Speaking with the power of one of her tabloid’s very few advertisers, I struck up a lively and ongoing discussion with her, about the suitability of her invention.

I stated that, first, we already had an neutral-gendered pronoun in “one,” and, second, that “Ve” was an easy target for parody, as in, “Are Ve are goving to vork zis mornink, dollink?” She argued back that “one” is extremely awkward to use, and that “Ve” was just as good, and just as strange, as anything that anyone else had ever come up with. Although she was correct in both instances, I was enough of a linguistic conservative, even back then, to be unable to concede the point. At any rate, her news outlet folded long before I closed my shop, and while the discussion was still on-going, so I guess that I won on a bye.

But our pronominal problem still persists. It’s a very serious difficulty, and it still seeks a satisfactory solution. Besides “Ve,” several other neologist possibilities have been put forward, including “xe” and “ze,” but so far none have grabbed the public’s imagination. So if you’d like to become rich and famous, and to appear in all of the print and on-line dictionaries, you might want to apply some brain power to the issue. The world awaits your input.