Gender-neutral pronouns were in the news again this Fall, as more universities gave students the option of picking their own pronouns. (For last year’s university pronoun news, click here). In addition to the traditional binary he and she, options may include invented words like ze, jhe, sie, and hie, along with singular they. “Ask me about my pronouns” has become a way to recognize gender nonconformity.
Not everybody is happy about this: one conservative student at the University of Michigan made a few headlines when he chose his majesty as his pronoun. Last year, when the Diversity Office at the University of Tennessee whispered a suggestion that maybe gender-inclusive pronouns would be nice, the state legislature was so outraged at this threat to family values that it passed a law forbidding the university to use state funds “to promote the use of gender-neutral pronouns.”
Despite such opposition, these epicene pronouns have a lot of support, and it's not just on college campuses. Since the early 1800s, dozens of pronouns have been coined to fill a semantic gap in the language: there is no gender-neutral, third-person singular pronoun in English, and a wide range of people, from grammarians and professional writers to social activists, think we need one. (For an annotated list of the coinages I’ve found so far, click here.) The question is not whether these pronouns should be banned or promoted. That's for people to decide for themselves, preferably without interference from the state legislature. Nor is the question whether an invented gender-neutral pronoun will earn a place in the pronoun system: centuries of failure suggest that's not happening any time soon. The question is, should they be in the dictionary?
I think they should. After all, these pronouns continue to be talked about, and it’s likely that people who encounter xe or hir or E might want to look them up. (When Donald Trump said bigly, people looked it up. When Sarah Palin said refudiate, when George W. Bush said misunderestimate . . . . Enquiring minds want to know.)
But putting these words into dictionaries poses a problem for lexicographers: which of the many pronouns competing for our attention deserves a dictionary entry? One? Two? Half a dozen? Ones coined yesterday and printed in the New York Times that may never be used again? Ones coined one hundred years ago and long forgotten? Ones like thon that sputter along, with a mention every once in a while?
No dictionary editor in their right mind is going to write an entry for each and every one, and there’s no clear way to choose which of the many alternatives among the ones that receive at least some degree of circulation should be recognized, and which ignored. So right now, although the major dictionaries tell us that the plural pronoun they can function as a gender-neutral singular too, they don’t define any of the invented pronouns at all.
That wasn’t always the case. Heer, hiser, and himer, coined in 1912 by Ella Flagg Young, Chicago’s Superintendent of Schools, found their way into Funk and Wagnalls, and thon, coined in 1884 by Charles C. Converse, was defined in Webster’s Second. But these inventions never gained wide appeal, and so the dictionaries eventually dropped them.
The entry for thon in Merriam-Webster’s Second New International Dictionary (1934).
But maybe it’s time to drag gender-neutral pronouns back from the lexicographical trash, not just heer and thon and ze, but all the ones that pop up over and over. And it can be done without making editors do what editors had to do all the time in the age of print-based dictionaries like Funk and Wagnalls: either write multiple entries for what are basically different versions of the same word, or define A as “see B” (which always got them into trouble when the definition of B was, “see C,” and C referred everyone back to A).
But in the age of the online dictionary, an editor can write a general definition of the gender-neutral pronoun and link the entries for thon, E, ze, per, and any other significant coinages to that definition. If a bunch of science fiction writers suddenly takes a fancy to ter, then ter goes in the data base with a link that takes the reader back to the all-purpose pronoun definition. If an online gender-nonconforming discussion group yields lots of instances of ip (a gender-neutral pronoun coined by Emma Carleton in 1884 that I personally would like to see revived), then slip ip into the database and link it up. And if next month someone coins a new form that's picked up by lots of students at Eastern Hipster State, then bam, link that up as well.
There are probably better ways to do this, too, but my point is, it can be done, and it needs to be done soon. The words are out there, and enquiring readers are trying to look them up.
