Fixing the Problems with Personal Pronouns
This essay is about 2 problems with personal pronouns in the English language:
Available Letters
I’m going to suggest using 1-letter pronouns as partial fixes for these problems. Here’s what we have to choose from:
What letters are available? The vowels, of course! But 3 of them are already spoken for:
Fixing the 2nd-Person Pronouns
One of them fairly screams “Use me!”. That would be U, which is an obvious substitute for the singular “you” and is already in wide use (tho in its lower-case form) in texting. As a replacement for the plural, I recommend “yall” (no apostrophe). This is already in verbal use in some parts of the shallow South (where it’s apostrophized to indicate that it’s a contraction of “you all”), and I choose to turn the other way when I hear that in the deep South “y’all” is the singular and “all y’all” is the plural.
What problem would this fix? Suppose you’re addressing your board of directors and the treasurer asks what you plan to do about the slowdown in revenue. Your response? “Well, I’d like to have a separate meeting with you about that.” To whom does the “you” refer, the treasurer (singular) or the entire board (plural)? If you had “U” and “yall” available, you wouldn’t have to explain yourself.
Of course, it would be an incomplete solution if I just stopped with the objective case, so here’s the complete set of replacements:
Fixing the 3rd-Person Pronouns
So now let’s look at what we can do with E.
And here I turn to the most persistent and irritating problem in English, the final vestige of gender in the language: the 3rd-person singular pronoun, which lacks a “human” option. I realize that this is about the 50th suggested fix for the problem, and none of the others have ever managed to catch on, but I figure it’s worth trying anyway.
There’s nothing wrong with “he”, “she”, and “it” if the gender of the referent is known, and in fact having the gender association helps keep things sorted out. “We invited Bill and Sue; she could go, but he couldn’t.”
But what happens if the person’s gender is uncertain? “They told me to contact Pat. Are you, um, her? him?”. (AFAICT, nobody has ever seriously proposed using “it” in this situation, since “it” is literally inhuman, tho on rare occasions it’s been used to refer to infants.) Or what happens if you aren’t even talking about a particular person but an indeterminate one in the abstract? “The last person to leave needs to turn off the lights; he/she should also push all the chairs back in.” OK, you can get away with “he/she” in writing, but who ever does that when speaking?
In fact, for the longest time the practice was to always assume the masculine “he” (or “his” or “him”) for people of indeterminate gender. Of course, this built all sorts of biases (some conscious, many unconscious) into the language, and we’ve been making a concerted effort to overcome them. That’s how we got “Ms.” instead of “Miss” and “Mrs.”, “firefighter” instead of “fireman”, “letter carrier” instead of “mailman”, “officer” instead of “policeman”, and Time’s “Person of the Year” instead of “Man of the Year”. This is a trend I heartily endorse.
However, here’s a trend I most decidedly do not endorse: the use of plural pronouns (“they”, “them”, “their”, “theirs”) as if they were singular. Pronouns are supposed to help you quickly understand whom you’re talking about. (Remember Bill and Sue, AKA he and she, from up above?) If “they” can be either singular or plural, the pronoun has failed to do its job. “Someone told Jan and Kim they could leave early.” In the standard meaning of “they” (plural), it’s clearly Jan and Kim who could leave early. But if “they” could also be singular, perhaps it was intended to refer to the unnamed “someone”. How can we tell? Either further explanation is required (where none was before) or people proceed as if they understood what was intended (when they may not have). In short, use of plurals as legitimate singulars just introduces ambiguity into the arena, creating a new problem without actually eradicating the old one, since the temptation to use “he”, “him”, and “his” will continue to exist. No thanks!
So I’m proposing to put E to work, as follows:
Commonalities
Notice a couple of patterns here. The singular subjective pronouns would all be capitalized single letters: I, U, and E. The new “human” pronouns all begin with an “e” for consistency. Everything’s short, as pronouns should be. And the only place where any of them are already in use are for the very purposes I propose for them here.
These look like winners to me. But then, so do the metric system and my aversion to switching back and forth with daylight saving time. Still, somebody has to go first, so why not me?
- ambiguity in the 2nd person (shown below in red) and
- inadequacy in the 3rd person (shown below in green).
Available Letters
I’m going to suggest using 1-letter pronouns as partial fixes for these problems. Here’s what we have to choose from:
What letters are available? The vowels, of course! But 3 of them are already spoken for:
- A, the indefinite article (usually uncapitalized),
- I, the 1st-person singular pronoun (invariably capitalized), and
- O, an interjection of surprise or astonishment (also invariably capitalized).
- E
- U
Fixing the 2nd-Person Pronouns
One of them fairly screams “Use me!”. That would be U, which is an obvious substitute for the singular “you” and is already in wide use (tho in its lower-case form) in texting. As a replacement for the plural, I recommend “yall” (no apostrophe). This is already in verbal use in some parts of the shallow South (where it’s apostrophized to indicate that it’s a contraction of “you all”), and I choose to turn the other way when I hear that in the deep South “y’all” is the singular and “all y’all” is the plural.
What problem would this fix? Suppose you’re addressing your board of directors and the treasurer asks what you plan to do about the slowdown in revenue. Your response? “Well, I’d like to have a separate meeting with you about that.” To whom does the “you” refer, the treasurer (singular) or the entire board (plural)? If you had “U” and “yall” available, you wouldn’t have to explain yourself.
Of course, it would be an incomplete solution if I just stopped with the objective case, so here’s the complete set of replacements:
Fixing the 3rd-Person Pronouns
So now let’s look at what we can do with E.
And here I turn to the most persistent and irritating problem in English, the final vestige of gender in the language: the 3rd-person singular pronoun, which lacks a “human” option. I realize that this is about the 50th suggested fix for the problem, and none of the others have ever managed to catch on, but I figure it’s worth trying anyway.
There’s nothing wrong with “he”, “she”, and “it” if the gender of the referent is known, and in fact having the gender association helps keep things sorted out. “We invited Bill and Sue; she could go, but he couldn’t.”
But what happens if the person’s gender is uncertain? “They told me to contact Pat. Are you, um, her? him?”. (AFAICT, nobody has ever seriously proposed using “it” in this situation, since “it” is literally inhuman, tho on rare occasions it’s been used to refer to infants.) Or what happens if you aren’t even talking about a particular person but an indeterminate one in the abstract? “The last person to leave needs to turn off the lights; he/she should also push all the chairs back in.” OK, you can get away with “he/she” in writing, but who ever does that when speaking?
In fact, for the longest time the practice was to always assume the masculine “he” (or “his” or “him”) for people of indeterminate gender. Of course, this built all sorts of biases (some conscious, many unconscious) into the language, and we’ve been making a concerted effort to overcome them. That’s how we got “Ms.” instead of “Miss” and “Mrs.”, “firefighter” instead of “fireman”, “letter carrier” instead of “mailman”, “officer” instead of “policeman”, and Time’s “Person of the Year” instead of “Man of the Year”. This is a trend I heartily endorse.
However, here’s a trend I most decidedly do not endorse: the use of plural pronouns (“they”, “them”, “their”, “theirs”) as if they were singular. Pronouns are supposed to help you quickly understand whom you’re talking about. (Remember Bill and Sue, AKA he and she, from up above?) If “they” can be either singular or plural, the pronoun has failed to do its job. “Someone told Jan and Kim they could leave early.” In the standard meaning of “they” (plural), it’s clearly Jan and Kim who could leave early. But if “they” could also be singular, perhaps it was intended to refer to the unnamed “someone”. How can we tell? Either further explanation is required (where none was before) or people proceed as if they understood what was intended (when they may not have). In short, use of plurals as legitimate singulars just introduces ambiguity into the arena, creating a new problem without actually eradicating the old one, since the temptation to use “he”, “him”, and “his” will continue to exist. No thanks!
So I’m proposing to put E to work, as follows:
Commonalities
Notice a couple of patterns here. The singular subjective pronouns would all be capitalized single letters: I, U, and E. The new “human” pronouns all begin with an “e” for consistency. Everything’s short, as pronouns should be. And the only place where any of them are already in use are for the very purposes I propose for them here.
These look like winners to me. But then, so do the metric system and my aversion to switching back and forth with daylight saving time. Still, somebody has to go first, so why not me?
Labels: ambiguity, case, English, gender, language, number, person, pronouns, solutions
posted by Richard S. Russell | 4:08 PM
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