Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

A Passionate Plea for a New Pronoun

For the love of god can someone please invent a gender-neutral singular pronoun? I’m trying to write a technical spec, and find myself fleeing again and again to the plural, because I’d otherwise have to fall back on “he” — or, worse, “he or she” — whenever I mention a user. The latter construction is a nasty blight on the English language, and the former excludes half our user base. So that’s not cool.

Yes, I know that “he” is generally supposed to apply to both sexes, and when I’m in my more combative moods I’ll use it with a feigned lack of compunction. But really I always feel bad about it. I read a book once where this race of beings did have such a pronoun, aer, but I think they had elements of both male and female in them, or something, so it doesn’t work for us. Also I object on principal to words that start with two vowels.

Sometimes I wish you could upgrade languages like you upgrade software. And that I was in charge of the process: the cranky Torvalds of the English language. I’d add the new pronoun, but I’d also immediately deprecate such horrors as “incentivize” and “retort”. All of the ugly constructs creeping inexorably into the language — like “step foot” or “could care less” or “irregardless” — would throw runtime exceptions as soon as they’re used, and take down the entire surrounding sentence. Exclamation points would be limited to one per ten thousand words.

I’d probably also introduce a debugger to diagnose writing failures — I have a whole hard drive full of stories that are badly in need of debugging.

English 2.0 — now with gender-neutral pronouns. Upgrade today!

I believe some people are actively pushing “xe” as a gender-neutral pronoun in English, but it’s obviously not getting much traction since I don’t think I know anybody who actually uses it in normal conversation.

A good fallback, as you noted, is the plural “they” which can sound weird. Equally as weird but probably not nearly as widely-used is using “it” to refer to a person. I started doing that with my friend in normal conversation — it sounded funny.

Ooo, I like xe. Sounds cool, and it gives the letter “x” something to do for a change.

“They” but used for a singular third-person was proper until the early 1900s, when “he” suddenly fell into vogue. (In German, “they” is used both as a plural and a formal version of “you,” so it has some precedent.)

“Xe” would make us all sound vaguely French. I think I speak for most in thinking that would be a bad idea.

I’m also in favor of adopting “yall” as the official second-person plural of written English. We definitely need to differentiate our pronouns in a context-free way.

Did LeGuin use something else in “Winter’s King” and Left Hand of Darkness, or just he? I think we should start using “one” more; all these made-up pronouns are annoying.

Stick with “he”. I do. It’s proper English. It does not exclude half your user base, because like it or not “he” is either masculine or gender neutral, as determined by the antecedent. Stating “he or she” or, worse, “s/he”, is, as you said, a terrible blight, an unnecessary bow to PC that should be stricken from usage at once. But I know not everyone agrees with this sentiment. To each his or her own.

For what it is worth I read a book many years ago that used “hish” as a gender neutral pronoun.

I think the argument that using he alone embodies patriarchy is true. But they is no solution; they is inescapably ungrammatical. He/she and S/he are distracting, and he-or-she unweildy.

Some have adopted the solution of alternating he and she as pronouns of unspecified gender. I think this is the most sensible solution. Why shouldn’t he and she politely take turns standing in for the non-gendered generic hypothetical or universal person?