||| 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.
Here is the solution: the writer should use his own gender as a generic pronoun (I am a he, so I just used “his”). This has two advantages. 1) We can all stop complaining about pronouns, since the writer is merely following a predictable and self-based protocol. 2) No one will be pressured into using pronouns for genders which are beyond his experience, leading to more authentic and less patronizing prose.
I have been using this protocol for many years. I occasionally say “he or she” when I want to very pointedly sound inclusive in front of a touchy audience. But make no mistake, I feel that I am slightly infantilizing them by doing so.
So much fun on a Sunday morning! Pushing out all pandemic and political for a short time.
Good topic Steve. But note that “they” and “their” have long been used as singular in circumstances where gender isn’t known or multiple genders are involved. Examples are as “Everyone went their own way” and “If someone wants to, they can.”
Susan, you wrote, “…note that ‘they’ and ‘their’ have long been used as singular…” So I have to ask: How long is “long”?
When I was in school, a mere 60-to-70 years ago, a tortured construction like “If someone wants to, they can” would have gotten me a straight F on any paper upon which it appeared.
The use of the plural pronoun “they” to represent an indeterminate singular pronoun may be acceptable now, but, to me, an unreconstructed grammatical conservative, it is still an abomination.
Let’s find something better. I suggest that James‘s solution, imperfect though it might be, is going in the right direction.
“The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf.”
…
“In the eighteenth century, grammarians began warning that singular they was an error because a plural pronoun can’t take a singular antecedent. They clearly forgot that singular you was a plural pronoun that had become singular as well.”
https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/
“They” and “their” are now so entrenched as gender-neutral singulars that any effort to replace them is unlikely to succeed, regardless of the merit of another approach. Usage is king. In fact the AP Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style have bitten the bullet. There’s an interesting article about that in the Columbia Journalism Review: https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/stylebooks-single-they-ap-chicago-gender-neutral.php Of course one can write around the problem. For example, by changing “If someone wants to…” to “If people want to….” Or “Everyone went their own way” to “They all went their own way.” In real writing, as opposed to grammar examples, there are often more elegant dodges.
I agree, Steve–The good sisters would have had me by an ear if I dared use the third person plural possessive relating to a singular subject. I don’t think the rule has changed; it’s that nobody seems to have been taught it after 1970. My spouse and I entertain ourselves by yelling the corrected grammar at the people on TV, but they never seem to learn. Of course, “everyone,” “someone,” and “anyone” take the singular verb. More TV yelling. Then subjunctive mood: “Were, dammit!” And don’t get me started on the the verbification of nouns. Is it Bayer that actually thinks it’s a fun idea to say “That is why we science.”?
It’s often worth looking at the OED.
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200700
I fear common usage and language evolution will have the last word, so to speak.
I’m with you, Peg!
And that includes yelling at the people on the TV.