blog posts

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  Pronoun backlash

  Oct 4, 2020 12:00 pm1367 views

  According to the Pew Research Center, most Americans have heard something about gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns, and one in five adults knows someone who uses such pronouns. As these pronouns gain currency, they’re also generating some backlash, especially on social media, where people feel free to say a lot of not nice things that may not always be carefully thought out.

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  Pronouns on TV: pop culture meets inclusive language

  Aug 1, 2020 11:45 am618 views

  You know that gender pronouns like hie and zie are a thing when they start showing up in TV dramas. If you haven’t noticed them, never fear, for I, your professor of pronouns, will now enlighten you.

  Let’s start with hen. It’s Swedish, not English, but be patient, because there’s an English tie-in at the end. 

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  The oldest genderless pronouns are lo and zo, for French, and e, es, em, for English

  Jul 16, 2020 1:00 pm712 views

  In 1765, Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve invented two genderless third-person pronouns, lo (singular) and zo (plural), for an artificial language that he called Langue nouvelle, or ‘new language.’ English didn’t catch up until 1841, when Francis Augustus Brewster coined e, es, and em.

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  Verbing pronouns

  Apr 20, 2020 10:00 am1075 views

  Nonbinary singular they has become so normal that people now want to know the rules for how to use it. Which is right, they is or they are? Is the reflexive themself or themselves? Even if your answer is, “Wait, what rules? There are no rules,” the fact that anybody’s asking is all the proof we need that English pronouns are continuing to change. Here’s the latest change: as we see in this tweet from the British writer and gender activist, Shon Faye, nonbinary singular they has become a verb:

  A trans man described his period of identifying as nonbinary to me the other day as “I was they/themming at the time.”

• Gender conceal: Did you know that pronouns can also hide someone's gender?

  Nov 9, 2019 4:15 pm2401 views

  Gender reveals have been exploding in the news recently, but there are also a growing number of gender conceals—using a pronoun to hide someone’s gender. Historically, two English pronouns have been used to mask a person’s gender: it and they. But so far the definitions of it and they don’t include the gender conceal.

  First let’s look at they. The Oxford English Dictionary lists three senses for singular they: 

  • referring collectively to members of a group (everyone, everybody)
  • referring to an individual generically or indefinitely (someone, a person, the student)
  • referring to someone who is nonbinary or gender-nonconforming (Sam Smith’s pronouns are they and them).

  I think it’s time to add a fourth sense:

  • referring to someone whose gender needs to be concealed (the whistleblower…they).
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  Can a Swedish pronoun cure sexism?

  Aug 29, 2019 10:45 am1587 views

  Can a coined gender-neutral pronoun reduce sexism? A recent study by Margit Tavits and Efrén O. Pérez published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is optimistic that it can. According to Tavits and Pérez, now that the new, ungendered Swedish pronoun hen is official, Swedes will be more open to women in public life and more likely to support the rights of LGBT people. Only hen is not really official in any meaningful sense, and Sweden was already socially progressive decades before hen gained prominence.

• A Brief History of Singular 'they'

  Jul 30, 2018 12:15 pm13361 views

  Singular they has become the pronoun of choice to replace he and she in cases where the gender of the antecedent—the word the pronoun refers to—is unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary, or where gender needs to be concealed. It’s the word we use for sentences like Everyone loves their mother.

  But that’s nothing new. The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375 . . .