‘The movement to make amends for the excludingness of the male pronoun,” recently noted the playwright Tom Stoppard, “is becoming ridiculous.” Whether this is truly a movement or merely a ruckus — a disturbance, a mere commotion — is less than clear. Whatever the case, the casual use of the male singular pronoun he has become an issue, a matter in the flux of controversy. What is at issue in the pronoun war is the want of a properly inclusive pronoun to use with collective and indefinite nouns and pronouns (no one, anyone, someone, none, etc.). This is not a matter likely to excite, let alone agitate, everyone. But it has become a bit of a problem for those scribblers among us who do not wish to slight women yet are not ready to abandon traditional grammar.
With woke culture riding high, the selection of pronouns has become a political act. Do I demonstrate what a fine fellow I am by writing “Every athlete knows that she requires conditioning”? Or do I go for “Every athlete knows that he or she requires conditioning,” which could destroy the rhythm of the sentences that follow by requiring one to repeat “he or she” endlessly on into the night? Or do I abandon the dictates of good grammar and write, “Every athlete knows that they require conditioning”? Or do I skirt nicely around the problem by writing “All athletes know that they require conditioning”? Finding a replacement for the generic he, according to Bryan Garner, is “the single biggest problem in sexist language.”
Ah, me, as Flaubert once said, “the language is inept.” So at least it has proved in failing to provide the (as they say nowadays) nonbinary pronoun that includes both sexes and those in between. In What’s Your Pronoun?, a book entirely given over to the subject, Dennis Baron, a retired professor of linguistics, has set out the history of the pronoun issue, which goes back in American and English life more than 200 years. The issue gained new energy in the 1970s with what is now recognized as the second wave of feminism, and further steam was added with the rise in the number of people who are transgendered. (Professor Baron reveals that the latter includes roughly 0.6 percent of our population, or 1.4 million Americans.) So heated has the pronoun issue become, he goes on to suggest, that “intentionally using the wrong pronoun” may constitute hate speech.
“The need of a common gender pronoun is now official,” writes Professor Baron. The traditional he has been declared no longer acceptable. The word’s adherents hold that it is generic, meant to include both men and women; its opponents claim that it is instead genderic, implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, excluding women. Throughout his book Professor Baron cites instances in which the use of the singular he has been called into service to deny women political office, seats on juries, interesting jobs, the vote itself. “The Constitution,” he notes, “uses masculine pronouns to describe the qualifications for office.” As recently as 2016, proposals have been put forth to rewrite this aspect of the Constitution, rendering it a “gender-neutral document.”
“The terminology of gender changes,” writes Professor Baron, “as ideas about gender change.” So in contemporary life the “ess” has been removed from “actress,” the “rix” from “aviatrix,” the “man” from “chairman” and “mankind”; waiters and waitresses have become “servers,” and more often than not their customers, no longer sirs and madames, have become “guys.” Some now want to change “Ms.” to “Mx.,” and “woman” to “womxn.” God Himself (Herself?) may one day end up a hermaphrodite.
So political has our world become that nowadays to insist on correct grammar is to mark oneself a conservative, if not a right-winger. Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto psychologist, was so branded for refusing to use gender-free pronouns on campus. Professor Baron writes: “Pronouns were political during the fight for suffrage, and they remain political today, though the focus of the debate has expanded from women’s rights to encompass the rights of LGBTQ persons, particularly those who identify as trans, nonbinary, or gender non-conforming, including their right to designate a pronoun.” Surprising, I suppose, that people of color have not yet asked for their own pronouns.
Professor Baron’s pronoun of choice is the singular they. He reminds us that Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Virginia Woolf used they and their as singulars. Lined up in opposition, clinging to the traditional he and his, have been Stephen Leacock, H. L. Mencken, H. W. Fowler, and William Strunk (of Strunk and White). In our own age of the triumph of the therapeutic, the American Psychological Association has chimed in by supporting “the choice of communities to determine their own descriptors.” The Chicago Manual of Style suggests that “in general a person’s stated preference for a specific pronoun should be respected.” Today in many colleges and universities at the beginning of a course students are asked to supply their own preferred pronoun. Professor Baron mentions a student who chose “your majesty”; no one thus far, at least to my knowledge, has chosen “schmuckowitz.”
Meanwhile, new pronouns have been put forward to avoid the dread masculine he and his. Here is a discouraging sampler: ip and id and thon (a blend of “that” and “one”); ze, vim, vit, um, sis, sim, sey, sem, sher, shim, ti, tis, tisself, hi, hes, hem, he’er, him’er, his’er, and so on. According to Professor Baron, more than 250 such neologisms have been proposed, “and more are surely on the way.” New words come into the language all the time; change is in the nature of language: Think of the word google, or bonk, or the at-first slow but now complete acceptance of gay for homosexual. Language changes, as Professor Baron notes, “when enough people use a word of their own accord.” But none of the proffered replacements for the once standard singular he has the right sound, look, feel. None has what you might — I wouldn’t but you might — call a Chinaperson’s chance of surviving.
In his impressive research, Dennis Baron is a true scholar, but in his politics he is a man of the Left, at least of the academic Left. Lining up with what is known as the descriptionist, as opposed to the prescriptionist, side in the realm of language change and choice, he approvingly quotes a late-19th-century writer named Eliza Frances Andrews to the effect that “speech is a born democrat; in its realm the voice of the people is supreme.” Professor Baron writes: “Given both the growing sensitivity to pronoun choice, and the variable usage of both traditional gendered pronouns and nonbinary options, variations that shows no sign of ending any time soon, the consensus on the many sites that provide advice on gender issues in general and pronouns in particular is to ask for a person’s pronoun and to try to use it.” The goal of changing pronouns, he adds, is “to validate the words of those whose voices have been considerably silenced.”
The generic singular he is finished, Professor Baron announces in his closing pages, “stake-through-the-heart dead.” The use of the singular they appears to be gaining ground in England, he notes. “A 2017 nonbinary/genderqueer survey of pronoun use reported that 80 percent of the 9,932 respondents chose they, up slightly from previous years,” he adds. Avoiding using they, he suggests, nowadays even sounds pompous. The word you, after all, functions as both a singular and a plural, so why can’t they? He writes: “Long ago they, like you, took on the dual role of singular and plural, and the singular they has been so well established, for so many centuries, that at this point resistance is futile.”
Yet at the conclusion of Professor Baron’s book-length argument for the singular they, I walked away unconvinced. He refers to those old sticklers, defenders of the grammatical use of the singular he. I, I fear, am among them. Academic feminists, always eager to find new forms of oppression, and hence new fields of battle, may anguish over what they feel are sexist pronouns, but then much of academic life has itself become a field of dreams for the nutty. Are many women outside academic life unable to imagine that the singular he generally refers to both men and women? One would like to think not.
In the 1950s, Winston cigarettes ran a commercial whose tag line was, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” At the time a small flap about that ungrammatical “like” arose, to which Winston’s advertising agency responded with the tag line, “What do you want, good grammar or good taste?” In the current ruckus over pronouns, the tag line might run, “What do you want, good grammar or acceptable woke politics?” Pressed to choose, I’ll take good grammar.
Comments