Putting gender pronouns in neutral
By WILLIAM WEIR - The Hartford Courant
For at least 150 years, people have been trying to solve the pronoun dilemma.
That would be the dilemma that causes ungainly formations out of fairness to both genders: “he or she,” “him or her,” or “s//he.” Some avoid the gender question altogether by speaking in the plural, as in “If anyone asks, tell them what they need to know.”
Some people have taken the more extreme approach of devising entirely new pronouns that specify no gender. “Ne,” “hizer,” “thon,” “shem” and “herm” are just a few that have come along, and faded almost as quickly. They’re known as gender-neutral, or epicene, pronouns.
The latest such pronoun comes from DeAnn DeLuna, who teaches literature at Johns Hopkins University. Her creation, “hu,” would replace he, she, him, her and his. Because it’s just one word, unlike an entire set of pronouns, DeLuna says its easier to use than other gender-neutral pronouns. And the word (pronounced “huh”), trips off the tongue easily.
Gender and pronouns have vexed language watchers for some time. At one point, the English language had no clear female pronoun, so it was a monumental shift when “she” emerged in the 12th century. In 2000, the American Dialect Society chose “she” as its Word of the Millennium.
The matter doesn’t prey too heavily on most people’s minds, but the debate hasn’t gone away.
The most common solution, using “they” or “them,” irks grammarians when the subject is singular. “One” is another pronoun substitute, and one that falls short. “When one opens one’s book, one will read from it.” That’s kind of awkward.
Beyond grammatical and aesthetic concerns are the sociopolitical. Folks in the transgender community have long charged that “he” or “she” forces them into categories they don’t necessarily identify with.
DeLuna says “hu” has been well-received within the transgender community. And she has given her creation a jump-start of sorts: She recently edited a book of essays about the historian J.G.A. Pocock and insisted that the book’s writers use the pronoun. “I had to be very tactful,” she says, but added that all the contributors went along with it.
It’s an uphill battle, DeLuna knows, but she holds out hopes that “hu” will enter everyday speech.
Good luck with that, says Dennis Baron, author of “Grammar and Gender.”
“It’s hard to say ‘I gotta a great idea’ and get other people to say ‘let’s do it,”’ he says. “There’s the ‘you’re not the boss of me’ response. People want to be correct, but they don’t want to be corrected.”
Gender-neutral pronouns have found limited success in academia. Among Connecticut Wesleyan students, for instance, the preferred alternative pronouns are “ze,” “zim” and their possessive, “hir.” But even within the progressive environs of that university, some professors have reservations about words that haven’t made their way into most dictionaries.
Matthew Sharpe, who teaches English at Wesleyan, says he’s politically sympathetic to the cause of gender-neutral pronouns. “Aesthetically, though, they rankle,” he says in an e-mail. “But so does ‘their,’ which more and more people seem to use as the possessive form of the general pronoun. I don’t think we’ve found a good solution to the problem yet.”
As for “hu,” DeLuna’s pronoun has gained traction in other pockets of academia. Many use it in the online forums of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Web site. But it also has been ridiculed in the same forums. One post on the word generated 22 Web pages of debate.
DeLuna has learned that people take their pronouns seriously. Even her friends have told her “hu” is a little too radical for them. That’s fine with her — debate is good.
“I’m interested in people having fun with language,” she says. “The idea is just to communicate.”
http://www.thestate.com/living/story/97624.html_________________
Man [...] must count no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth." (Jean Paul Sartre, 1943)
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