Kip Robisch, on what to do about those pesky gendered pronouns and other steps towards being more articulate.
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One of the things I like about The Good Men Project is that it transcends the old gentleman’s handbooks—you know, those crimson leather, gold leaf pocket editions that a guy might get for a birthday present or when graduating from college. Here’s how to tie a half Windsor. Every man should shave with a straight razor and carry a calling card. That sort of thing. Such teaching is great to have, but some of it runs high enough on the eccentricity meter to render it obsolete, like writing with a quill pen.
Some devices in the gentleman’s tool kit continue to work, though, and certain aspects of being in the world can’t be replaced by novelty or technology. This is a mantra for me whenever I’m in environments that champion social or technological trends just because they’re happening, rather than examining the effects of such trends.
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Until the late 20th century, languages moved more like tectonic plates than like ocean waves. The shifts were less perceptible than the roll and whisper toward the seventh wave and its symbolic moment. You wake up one day and discover that the “um” word most people are using is “like” instead of “y’know.” You say, “Are you sure ‘if I were there’ is the right way to say that?” You remember a rule from grade school that some taskmistress teacher drilled into you, and when you correct with certainty and gravitas someone at the dinner table, you are not thanked. You are called “old man” or “picky.”
More than ever, language is starting to look more like the breaking wave than the tectonic plate. Twitter and texting have especially contributed to a more codified language—rendered as a set of symbols driven toward being succinct (too complimentary a word…how about fast) rather than thorough. The first time I saw, “Wr R U?” in an email—the residual robotic language from someone who’d spent too much time on a phone punching buttons as his preferred form of communication—I got nervous about where language was headed. When I hear someone say, “Whatever,” I’m more offended than if that person were to drop the F-bomb. Both words indicate a lack of articulation for the moment, but at least the latter has some emotional stake. The former is, unless used sarcastically, a giant white flag too laconic to even wave in the breeze. In future articles I’ll look at the issue of cursing. (Cursing’s the shit.) But, ahem, this article is about taking a step toward being more articulate.
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The issue of being eloquent or coherent certainly isn’t a “guy thing” at all, which should be obvious, but it can be gendered. For instance, women are against a very particular obstacle in high energy or strident environments, because if they come on too strong they’re seen as “bitchy,” and because their voices and phrasing tends toward higher and more (generally tougher on the ear) rather than lower and less (generally tougher on the conversation progressing beyond protecting power). Similar challenges exist even in grammar and mechanics. As a grammar mechanic, I’d like to help tighten up a few loose screws.
It’s easy enough to say, “Pay attention to how you communicate,” but that is for me too much like the joke about the party clown who wasn’t funny. The clown hires a writer to hold up cue cards for him at the party so he can make people laugh. The party starts. In the back of the room, the first poster board comes up. It reads, “Tell a funny joke.”
It helps to have some specifics on how to be received as well spoken.
The biggest problem we now face, in my view, is this: English lacks a gender-neutral pronoun beyond the subject “one” as a referent for the pronoun “one.” This the most egregious failure of the language, and frankly, one that amazes me. We will invent a word for anything that comes along and might only be the fad of a few years (remember when “cyberspace,” a term coined by science fiction writer William Gibson, was the default way of referring to the internet?). But we dig in against fixing such problems as pronoun number and gender agreement.
The male pronoun has been the default pronoun for a gender neutral subject (“an officer,” “a writer,” “a person”) for centuries. This is unethical and needs to be fixed. We also haven’t found a solution that’s stuck, and not because there’s some male conspiracy against the solution, but because the proposed solutions have been at times clumsy and at times hilarious. We tried to invent what I call The Suh-hee in various forms: s/he, (s)he, or s-he. All problems, mainly because of putting punctuation into a word and expecting someone to say it.
“He or she” still privileges the male pronoun. It’s clunky to say, and switching to “she or he” might as well just be the use of “she” instead of “he” for the subject: “If a writer wants to be published, then she should take a lot of editors out to lunch.” We’re still doing sexism and the 50% pronoun referent. Of course, we could do what we too often do to animals that have different sexes and call ourselves “it,” but this would probably increase the number of people needing to see therapists about self image.
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I can offer some solutions, or at least ameliorations:
Don’t generalize. Try to be careful and specific about what you mean. If you are thinking of a singular example, then use it rather than starting a sentence with the word “People,” or “Everybody” and extrapolating into a universal declaration. Fact is not truth, but the two often go together nicely. Superlatives not only set you up to lose an argument, but also tend to lose you credibility even before the argument. “People” can hardly be said to do anything as a group.
As per that classic of writing instruction, Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, avoid “one” as a subject. The only pronoun that agrees with the subject “one” is “one.” This leads to all kinds of problems, including the problem on which I’m focused now—agreement. One does not mix “one” with “they” or “he and she.” One must stay with “one” as one’s choice of pronoun. One may see how this might give one pants-soiling twitch fits during either conversation or reading.
The plural pronoun has become so commonly used in reference to a singular subject that at times it’s simply absurd. Given the issues I just mentioned about the gender neutral pronoun’s pathetic state, it makes sense that a terrible solution became the acceptable one. We would never say, “If Ray is coming over, then they should call” to mean that Ray should call. Either someone is expected in that sentence to call on Ray’s behalf, or Ray has a multiple personality disorder. But we’ll say, “Someone wanting tickets to the game should call their local radio station by five today.” That’s incorrect. “Someone” is singular, and “their” is a plural possessive. Unfortunately, are you going to say, “his local radio station?” Solve the problem with “the local radio station.”
The “their radio station” example also serves as advice about another problem: Get rid of a possessive pronoun in favor of using an article (a, an, the) plus a specific noun.
Think in terms of neutral sentence constructions instead of trying to quibble over pronouns. The rhetorical second person can be useful: “If you want tickets to the game, then call the radio station by five today.” Not a gendered moment in that sentence. It’s a person wanting tickets and a radio station providing them.
If need be, default to the plural subject. “All people who generalize really get on my nerves.” Now you can contradict yourself without also sounding sexist. “Politicians giving themselves raises should consider their constituencies.” Usually you wouldn’t use a pronoun ending in “self” (another lesson entirely), but here “themselves” solves the problem of subject/pronoun agreement. “A politician” sets you up to gender the pronoun. Of course, many of us wouldn’t mind using the pronoun “it” to refer to certain members of Congress.
Finally, here’s a suggestion that I hope “trends,” as we like to say online: I think that the default singular pronoun should be the gender of the writer. Note that I didn’t say the sex of the writer. If I gender myself male, then I default to the male pronoun: “A writer on the cutting edge of emotional expression should consult his psychologist regularly.” Here I’m using the male pronoun. This indicates to my reader that I gender myself male and therefore am choosing a singular pronoun to identify with that gender. Someone gendering his or her (!) biological self female would say, “her psychologist,” and so by implication identify personally into the piece being written. This way, in time, if I read an article that uses the feminine pronoun, then I am aware of the presence of the writer as a woman, which could exhibit as much strength as weakness in establishing context and audience identification. I’d pitch this idea to grammar handbooks, but that isn’t how grammar handbooks are constructed. They’re responsive to culture as well as designed to steer culture toward existing conventions of language. So instead, I’m pitching it to us—the ocean—to see if we can’t erode the dangerous rock of the gendered pronoun. “It” and “one” have sunk more ships than they have saved.
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One thing important to note here is the difference between written and spoken articulation. In writing we aren’t supposed to be working on the fly, in the moment, under the expectation of an immediate response. We’re supposed to revise and edit. The loss of not only this skill but this sense of the difference has had a reciprocal effect on our speech as well. Twitter has been especially bad for what we sometimes call “the filter”—which in a written piece of work is supposed to be the time spent carefully considering a better way to articulate a thought, rather than the first way to do so. Bad speech can pollute writing, and vice versa, to the point at which we just don’t remember any rules, cease to care, and sound like dolts. This matters as much in a job interview as when arguing about the 3-4 defense versus the Cover 2 as when asking someone on a date. For instance, your default pronoun when first meeting someone to whom you’re attracted should be neither “baby” nor to pull out your phone and ask if you can text her (ß gendered myself).
Audience awareness is its own subject, but for now, I’m advocating the practice of practice—thinking a sentence before you speak it when the unfortunate fact of the missing gender neutral pronoun is at stake. You could either offend or engage people to whom you speak; you choose. When being interpreted as sexist is a possibility, being an articulate man really helps you navigate the current, usually more than the force of one’s natural charisma.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Such a shame that the case for ‘they’ as a singular pronoun is based on decades—if not centuries—of common usage, and not on your personal preferences and opinions.
‘“Someone wanting tickets to the game should call their local radio station by five today.” That’s incorrect.’
It’s also very clear, succinct, effortless and unambiguous.
And this: http://bsun.md/10NzxSV
Here’s another short video discussing the issue:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/video/0033-hisher.htm?&t=1389381694
I enjoyed this, too. Reminded me, however, that there is a gender-neutral pronoun: http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/2008/01/yo_peep_yo_the_birth_of_a_gend_1.html
I enjoyed your writing. You had me chuckling several times. I don’t mind “they” as a gender neutral pronoun. I’ve actually written stuff with it but people don’t understand it.
Stop this.