Today's the birthday of a pronoun. On January 6, 1912, Chicago School Superintendent Ella Flagg Young began her talk at a meeting of principals saying,
A principal should so conduct his’er school that all pupils are engaged in something that is profitable to him’er. [Chicago Daily Tribune, 7 January, 1912, p. 7.]
According to the Tribune, the principals gasped. Ignoring murmurings from the audience, Young continued,
I don’t see how one can map out the work for the fifth or sixth grade when he’er has always done the work in the grades above or below.
Young then explained that she had coined a set of what she called duo-personal pronouns, and she continued to use them throughout her speech. The principals reacted positively to these gender-neutral, nonbinary alternatives, resolving to introduce them in their schools.
The absence of a common-gender, third-person singular pronoun, a word to use when gender is unknown or irrelevant, was noticed as early as 1792, and word coiners began trying to fill that gap as early as the 1850s. Although the Tribune suggests that Young invented heer, himer, and hiser on the way to her talk that morning, in a later interview in the Baltimore Sun, Young shares credit for coining them earlier with a friend, Fred S. Pond (Baltimore Sun, 11 February, 1912, p. 15), adding that the new pronouns are merely suggestions:
No one person can make any part of the language. Any suggestion may be offered by an individual. That suggestion must be given consideration by many educators before it can become part of the language. No person, no matter how exalted his or her station may be, is qualified to make a part of the language without the aid of others. The language belongs to us all. . . . Because I am superintendent of schools in Chicago I possess no right to force word ideas on the multitude.
Heer, hiser, and himer may have been welcomed by the school principals, but just a day after the Tribune report, Ben Blewett, superintendent of schools in Saint Louis, rejects them in favor of the generic masculine (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8 January, 1912, p. 14). Calling pronouns “generic, not genderic,” Blewett insists, “generically we are all men,” at least until the feminist revolution takes hold:
In fact when women achieve their ambition to enter all the walks of life in competition with men the feminine form of pronoun may come into general use. . . . Miss Young is represented as suggesting “he’er.” Why not: “She’er,” and why not “her'er” instead of “him'er.”
Common-gender pronouns were frequently associated with the campaign for women’s rights, and antifeminists were quick to criticize inclusive pronouns as threats to what they saw as the natural order. Picking up on Blewett’s she’er, an anonymous St. Louis critic argues that the female-first “cogendrous pronouns” are not pleasing to the ear because men are simply more harmonious than women:
[T]he masculine pronoun is more euphonic than the feminine, because—well, is it because the thing with which it is consociated, and for which it stands, is better attuned to the laws of harmony, and of cadence, as expressed in nature? [St. Louis Globe-Democrat; rpt., Colfax (WA) Gazette, 19 January, 1912, p. 4]
And the editor of Harper’s Weekly suggests that Young’s common-gender pronouns signal the end times for language:
When “man” ceases to include women we shall cease to need a language, and won’t care any more about pronouns. [Harper’s Weekly, 27 January, 1912, p. 5).
On the plus side, Isaac K. Funk, of Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary fame, finds Young’s pronouns to be good, if a bit harsh: “These words, like Wagner’s music, are better than they sound” (New York Times, 12 January, 1912, p. 12). Like Young, Funk recognizes “the great need of a personal pronoun to represent both sexes,” though he thinks that thon, the common-gender pronoun already authorized by his Standard Dictionary, has a better chance of succeeding. However, soon after writing this, Funk added heer, hiser, and himer to his dictionary as well. Although no coined pronoun ever achieved wide use, thon and heer remained in Funk and Wagnalls until the 1960s.
Creators of nonbinary pronouns often worked alone, with little fanfare. Although Young didn’t realize it, hiser had been coined before, perhaps as early as 1850. It was mentioned by self-described “progressive teacher” Alice Heath in 1879, though she preferred another common-gender coinage, the pronoun e (Holt County [MO] Sentinel, 31 January, 1879, p. 3). Hiser is mentioned again in 1884, in connection with thon, coined that year by C. C. Converse (New York Commercial Advertiser, 7 August, 1884). That same year, another wordsmith reinvented hiser and himer (The Literary World, 6 September, 1884, p. 294). And unaware of Young’s creation, several word coiners offered hiser again in the 1970s.
Not only that, there have been more than 100 common-gender pronouns proposed since the mid-nineteenth century, words like ip, zie, se, tey, po, jhe, xe, and ha, and new ones are being coined even as I write. You can check out my historical collection of these, along with early comments for and against singular they, here.
But today’s the day for heer, hiser, and himer. On this, their birthday, let there be cupcakes and ale and a general celebration for a word most people find necessary, but nobody wants to use. I mean, let’s get real: since it popped up in the fourteenth century, singular they has been the nonbinary pronoun of choice, both for English speakers and writers who want to make a point of being inclusive, and for those who don’t (you can read more about singular they here). So check your pronouns, charge your glasses, and toast the common-gender pronoun: it’s a word that failed, but also one that defiantly refuses to die.
Further reading: For a comprehensive historical database of nonbinary pronouns, click here.
