my latest windmill to tilt at

[rone]

English already has perfectly useful gender-neutral pronouns: it, its. Use them. Do not use they, them for singular objects. Do not use the abhorrent, artificial 'hir', 'zie', 'blim', 'gur', or whatever. Yes, people can be called 'it'. Deal with it.

Comments

[jwgh]

Two problems with 'he' being both the neutral and the male pronoun are:

1. It's ambiguous.

   I remember reading of someone who was reading a book (it doesn't get more immediate than that!) which talked about man's reasoning power, his insight, and things of that nature. The reader's initial assumption was that this was a use of the gender-neutral pronoun. However, later in the book there was a big misogynistic screed about how women lack these abilities. This caused a bit of a mental train-wreck.

   How are you supposed to tell that this is going on? Sure, sometimes it's obvious, but other times it's not (and sometimes when it seems obvious it isn't).

2. The gender-neutral "he" isn't actually gender-neutral.

   If it were, you would see things like:

   Man is a mammal; he has hair and nourishes his young with milk secreted by his mammary glands.

   I think most people would agree that this is a very strange-sounding passage, though.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

1. It's ambiguous.

Context-dependent != ambiguous. Ambiguity is a result of poor writing, which no amount of fiddling with vocabulary will ever fix. :)

I'll go a little bit further out on this limb and state that avoiding ambiguity is not a self-justifying goal. The human brain is very, very good at disambiguation, as evidenced by the existence of languages like, say, Japanese, where not only is (third-person) gender contextual, but so are plurals. (Weirdly, Japanese forces you to specify gender when speaking in the first person.) Why not play to our strengths?

I'll happily live with a bit of ambiguity in the lexicon if it helps prevent English from turning into Latin or, god forbid, German.

I think most people would agree that this is a very strange-sounding passage, though.

Deliberately constructed worst-case examples usually do sound strange. :) Drop the unnecessary final 'his', and it immediately sounds 66% less stilted.

[jwgh]

Context-dependent != ambiguous. Ambiguity is a result of poor writing, which no amount of fiddling with vocabulary will ever fix. :)

(A side-note: are we only talking about writing or are we also discussing how people should talk? But anyway.) This seems to assume that there is always a good way to indicate that you are using he-as-neutral-pronoun vs. he-as-male-pronoun, but I'm not convinced this is the case.

I think most people would agree that this is a very strange-sounding passage, though.

Deliberately constructed worst-case examples usually do sound strange. :) Drop the unnecessary final 'his', and it immediately sounds 66% less stilted.

Really? Can you create a similar worst-case example demonstrating the use of he as a male pronoun?