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Amanda Luzzader
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It’s hard to believe how much buzz surrounds pronouns lately. After all, pronouns are just parts of speech (usually short little words) that are used in place of nouns. Nowadays, however, practically every news cycle contains some controversy or confusion about how to use pronouns (and how not to!) and who prefers which ones.
In this two-part article, we’ll discuss the technicalities, history, and etiquette of personal pronouns.
What are pronouns?
Pronouns are technically defined as a set of English words that can be used as substitutes for nouns and noun phrases. They’re used to simplify spoken and written speech and the nouns they replace of are typically understood using context. For example, the pronoun “he” can be used to replace the noun “William” and the pronoun “they” can be used to collectively refer to entire groups of people (so that they needn’t be referred to individually). Consider the following sentences:
With no pronouns: “William is going Amanda’s house to pick up Amanda, and then William and Amanda will drive to William’s house so that William and Amanda can study for William and Amanda’s class.
With pronouns: “William is going to Amanda’s house to pick her up, and then they’ll go to his house so they can study for their class.”
Pronouns have forms for first-person usage (I, me), second-person usage (you), and third-person usage (he, she, they). Pronouns come in singular form (I, me, you), plural form (we, us, they, them), and they can be used as an object (I, me, us) or subject (you, they, them). Pronouns also have interrogative forms, such as who, whose, whom, and which (as in, “Whom do you know?” and “Which do you prefer?).
So, what’s all the hubbub with pronouns lately?
Speaking of “which do you prefer,” in recent years there has been a great deal of emphasis placed on personal pronoun preference. However, gender-neutral and custom-defying pronouns are not a new phenomenon. The English language as we know it has always lacked a singular pronoun to use when the gender of a noun is not specified. Take the following sentence, for example:
“When a person hears music, it makes him or her happy.”
That’s how we once handled pronouns for a singular, indefinitely gendered noun. We now seem to have been given permission by language nerds to use a singular “they” in cases like this, but go back in time only 10 years ago and this was by no means allowed in formal usage. “They” has always been gender-neutral, but until very recently it was rigidly plural. Using it otherwise could get you washed out of English class. But even this new-ish development in personal pronouns is just one of many throughout history. Here’s a survey of some of history’s notable personal pronoun landmarks:
-1599. Although his original text is not easy to read, Geoffrey Chaucer apparently uses a plural “they” to refer to a singular person in his Canterbury Tales (And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, They wol come up…). William Shakespeare did the same thing.
-1600s. The medical community routinely employed the gender-neutral pronouns “they” and “them” to refer to persons whose genders were ambivalent or not definitely known. This practice was more or less struck down in the 1700s, when “they” was codified in English grammar as a plural pronoun and thus unsuitable for use in the singular case.
-1858. New Jersey attorney Charles Converse popularized the word “thon” (short for “that one”) as a gender-neutral pronoun. The word made its way into Funk and Wagnalls dictionaries for a short time and has resurfaced periodically.
-1912. Chicago school teacher Ella Flagg Young decided that “The English language is in need of a personal pronoun of the third person, singular number, that will indicate both sexes and will thus eliminate our present awkwardness of speech.” Instead of of saying “he or she” and “him or her” Young suggested the pronouns “he’er,” “his’er,” and “him’er” as a workaround. The practice was not adopted into popular usage.
-1970. New York feminist Mary Orovan came up “co” (which as a suffix Orovan had worked in advertising and knew all about developing creative slogans. The word co—which roughly means “together”—already had inclusivity built into its linguistic roots. It just popped into her head one day, and she thought it had a certain ring to it. Orovan made the case for co—and its other variations, cos and coself—in a pamphlet she published called Humanizing English, which she passed around feminist circles.
Of course, the present-day development of and the use of singular, gender-neutral pronouns has little to do with Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, or history’s disgruntled grammar experts—it has everything to do with gender identity.
Most experts agree that the rise of preference for and choice of personal pronouns began with the advent of global social media. In the same way your favorite cat meme or video went viral, the matter of personal pronouns has received an incredible amount of attention in the age of social media. Before widespread social media use, pronoun choice and proper pronoun etiquette may have been topics only the LGBTQ+ community paid attention to—not anymore.
Controversy about pronouns abounds, usually in schools and the workplace. In Wisconsin, for instance, the state supreme court recently upheld the right of students to specify their own pronouns, even if they are different from those assigned to them by their parents or others. In Geary County, Kansas, a middle school teacher was reprimanded and suspended for allegedly addressing a student with the wrong pronouns and wrong name, but then was later awarded $95,000 in damages and attorney’s fees after she claimed in a lawsuit that her First Amendment rights had been violated by the school district. In Wyoming, the Sweetwater County attorney recently declared that using the wrong pronouns to refer to school kids did not rise to the level of criminal prosecution.
Now that we’ve filled in a little of the background and context of the personal pronoun issue, we’re ready to discuss how to handle the topic in everyday circumstances, such as with friends and in the workplace. In the second part of this two-part article, we’ll continue the discussion.
Sources:
https://fox4kc.com/news/local-school-settles-with-teacher-in-pronoun-controversy/
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/06/gender-neutral-pronouns-arent-new/619092/
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49754930
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