March 6, 2008
He or She or the Primordial Lie
“The country is filling up gradually with people who have been reared on ugly, childish writing and will never expect anything else,” warns Yale University’s David Gelernter in an essay in The Weekly Standard.
What exactly has drawn Gelernter’s ire? Navel-gazing tales of uplift? Turgid poststructuralist essays? Pentagon death notices that include phrases like “up-armored high-mobility-multi-purpose wheeled vehicle”?
None of the above. Gender-neutral phrases like “he or she,” Gelernter says, are driving the English language to its ruin:
And it gets worse. At the bottom of this junkpile is a maneuver that seems to be growing in popularity, at least among college students: writing “she” instead of neutral “he,” or interchanging “he” and “she” at random. This grotesque outcome follows naturally from the primordial lie. If you make students believe that “he” can refer only to a male, then writers who use “he” in sentences referring to men and women are actually discussing males only and excluding females—and might just as well use “she” and exclude males, leaving the reader to sort things out for himself. The she-sentences that result tend to slam on a reader’s brakes and send him smash-and-spinning into the roadside underbrush, cursing under his breath. (I still remember the first time I encountered such a sentence, in an early-1980s book by a noted historian about a Jesuit in Asia.)
At Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum of the U. of Edinburgh urges Gelernter to calm down. Gender-neutral pronouns – including the singular use of they — have a history that goes back long before Free to Be . . . You and Me. Gelernter’s “ignorance of the history of English literature on this point is breathtaking,” Pullum writes.
Norm Geras and the eternally stressed semanticist are also unimpressed.
Gelernter makes no mention of the fledgling gender-neutral pronoun hu, which The Chronicle has visited here and here.
And if a pundit is going to write about gender and pronouns in 2008, he or she really ought to mention this.
(Photo of a marked-up high school English paper by the Flickr user 0595. Used under a Creative Commons license.)
David Glenn | Posted on Thursday March 6, 2008 | PermalinkComments
Previous: Superdelegates and the Rebirth of American Civic Life
Next: 'Dude! What's Up With the Bible?!?'
I have for years urged people to become sensitive to anthropocentrism and even animal-centrism in writing. I propose the introduction of a new pronoun to address the problem, a combination of she, he, and it, something like this: s/h/t. Maybe with the ‘i’ included.
A little more seriously: in writing philosophy I find it useful to alternate, more or less, the masculine and feminine pronouns—though I will sometimes use the masculine generically, too. Using both often makes it possible to keep track of characters in an argument scenario: e.g., “A certain philosopher says that she uses the generic ‘he’, whereas another one says that he uses ‘he’ solely in a gender-specific manner.” As the paragraph goes on, it is easy for a reader (and even for me) to keep things distinct.
I do agree with Gelernter that inexperienced writers often produce a prose mess by using alternatives to gender- neutrality without a plan.
— dionysos Mar 6, 04:00 PM #
The singular use of “they” is part of The Queen’s English, literally. NPR some years ago broadcast a snippet of Queen Elizabeth II at a Windsor Castle dinner honoring Prince Charles (as formal an occasion as one might imagine) where she asked “everyone to lift their glass” in a toast.
— Martin Levine Mar 6, 05:52 PM #
Maybe we should ask a drag queen for advice on this?
— marci Mar 6, 06:34 PM #
When I pointed out the problem to my son, then in middle school, he suggested the adoption of a gender-neutral pronoun modeled on the plural—hey, heir, hem. It still seems to me a reasonable way out, except for the fact that each one of those is a pre-existing English word.
— Helene Mar 7, 01:15 AM #
Actually, I’ve come to see how often we can skirt the issue entirely, both being gender-neutral and avoiding awkwardnesses such as he/she or potentially confusing neologisms. This can be done by recasting in the plural, judiciously using the passive, or even eliminating the pronoun altogether: “everyone is asked to give an [not his/her/whatever] opinion.”
The Society for Music Theory’s Committee on the Status of Women has a useful page on this topic, providing concrete examples of rewriting possibilities and starting from the premise not of political correctness but, as they say, the notion that a word such as “man” is inherently ambiguous if it doesn’t refer to a male human. I’m sure there are other such discussions out there, of course, but this is the one I found, and it’s changed how I write.
— Alice Clark Mar 7, 06:53 PM #
David Gelernter also laments the use of “firefighter” instead of “fireman” as if this were a tragic innovation. In fact, firefighter is the old, correct term. The saying is “a fireman shovels coal, a firefighter fights fires,” and by fireman it refers to workers on a coal-driven locomotive. I actually remember David Gelernter making this same error about 20 years ago.
— Jim O'Hara Mar 15, 06:07 PM #