[Ads-l] epicene pronouns (Economist magazine)

[James A. Landau]

The most recent issue (dated April 1) of _Economist_ magazine had a filler article on epicene pronouns.  ADS gets a mention in the article, although it is a little disconcerting to discover that ADS has a "sword":

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21719768-praise-singular-they-english-has-traditional-solution-gender-neutral-pronouns

<quote>
Johnson

English has a traditional solution to gender-neutral pronouns

In praise of singular “they” 

 From the print edition | Books and arts

COPY editors are opinionated. Whether titles of books should be in italics or in inverted commas can divide them more decidedly than the Sharks and the Jets. So at a recent meeting of the American Copy Editors Society, the “Chicago Manual of Style” and the Associated Press (AP) stylebook, both widely followed, announced a change that sent waves through the audience. In AP’s wording, “They/them/their is acceptable in limited cases as a singular and-or gender-neutral pronoun, when alternative wording is overly awkward or clumsy.”

English lacks an uncontroversial pronoun that lets you talk about a person of a generic or unknown gender—known as an “epicene” pronoun, from the Greek for “common to all” (genders). Some would say that “each president chooses his own cabinet” is epicene—but psychological research proves that the his calls to mind a man. (If you truly believe his is gender-neutral, try “Steve, Sally, Mary and Jane each had his hair cut today.”)

Other languages face the problem in different guises. In French the possessives son, sa and ses do double duty as “his” and “her”. A chacun son opinion can be read as “Each has his opinion” or “Each has her opinion.” But French can’t avoid the issue entirely: Chaque président choisit son cabinet (“each president picks his cabinet”) uses a masculine noun for president, which the French traditionally consider epicene, for a generic or unknown president. But if the president is a woman, the title becomes the clearly feminine présidente. So “generic” titles like président do subtly indicate a man.

Nearly always, if a language must choose one gender to be generic, it is the masculine. Banawá, spoken in Brazil, is an exception, but its speakers also happen to treat women and girls quite brutally, according to Dan Everett, a linguist who has studied them. Grammar is not destiny.

The AP and Chicago (and the forthcoming edition of The Economist stylebook) open the door to a controversial—but surprisingly traditional—solution to the problem: “each president chooses their own cabinet”. Some people say it is illogical: each president is singular, and their is clearly plural. Efforts to use their instead of his are modern political correctness running roughshod over grammatical good sense.

But that is wrong. Their can do double-duty just as your can for both singular and plural. You has a partly parallel history. First, it was the object form of ye for a plural: we-us, ye-you. Then it replaced ye: we-us, you-you. It was then used as a polite way to refer to a single person, much like the French vous. Then it started edging out the common way to refer to a single person, thou. From second-person-plural pronoun in the objective case to a singular in the nominative is a pretty big shift. Pressing they/their/them into service for a generic or unknown referent is actually less of a leap.

Supporters of the epicene they argue that it is high time this was accepted, in a world aware of sex discrimination. But this is unlikely to convince traditionalists. A better argument is that the singular they is hardly a newfangled political invention. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for a sex-neutral, indefinite they is from about 1375. (Singular you as a subject dates back only to 1405.) Singular they appears subsequently in an unbroken stream of high-quality sources from the King James Bible (“in lowlinesse of minde let each esteeme other better then themselues”) to the writings of Walter Bagehot, a former editor of The Economist (“Nobody fancies for a moment that they are reading about any thing beyond the pale of ordinary propriety”) to today. The American Dialect Society crowned singular they itsword of the year for 2015.

The alternatives are worse. He or she quickly becomes wearisome on repetition. Alternating he and she is distracting. Inventing pronouns does not help: from hersh to ze, made-up gender-neutral pronouns have never taken off and probably never will.

One alternative would be to make the referent plural: “Presidents choose their own cabinets.” This is usually the best thing to do. But there are times when a writer wants to conjure an individual, albeit a generic one. In such cases, the truly newfangled options have failed to gain widespread acceptance among editors and writers of quality. Singular, epicene they has not just modern gender equality but seven centuries of the finest literary tradition on its side. As usage disputes go, this should be an easy one.
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