Ep 259: What’s Your Pronoun?
Andy Earle
Hey, it's Andy from talking to teens, it would mean the world to us. If you could leave us a five star review. reviews on Apple and Spotify help other parents find the show. And that helps us keep the lights on. Thanks for being a listener. And here's the show. You're listening to talking to teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle. We're here today with Dennis Baron. Talking about pronouns it seems that there's a lot of discussion about pronouns lately, especially among young people. And people are so much more educated about pronouns, there are so many options for pronouns that people can use to express themselves. It turns out that all of this is not maybe as new as it might seem, Dennis has written a book called What's your pronoun, which dives into the history of alternative pronoun usage in English language, and it gives us a lot of insight into how we use pronouns. Today, we're going beyond he and she, on today's episode to cover IP, ham, Ze, and Han, among others. Stay tuned. Dennis Baron is here. Dennis, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Dennis Baron
Great to be here, Andy
Andy Earle
talked to me about this book, I just read what's your pronoun beyond he and she,
this is really fascinating. Here you go really deep dive into pronouns and talking about all kinds of pronouns I'd never even heard before, I learned a ton about kind of the history of pronouns in our language and everything. Talk to me about this, what inspired this book? And where did all this come from?
Dennis Baron
A long, long time ago. And this is like, over 40 years ago, I was researching attempts to reform the English language, of which there have been many, many everybody uses English, then there's always a subset of people who say, I think I can make it better. Yeah,
Andy Earle
we're doing it wrong, you guys.
Dennis Baron
Were doing it all wrong, talk better. Good English is like this magical goal that everybody's aiming for. And, and some people decide that they may have a shortcut, or figure out some kind of on ramp to, to make sure we all get there faster, better, and more efficiently. So one of the things I mean, there were spelling reforms and grammar reforms. And there was this movement to get rid of borrowed words in English, anything from another language, get rid of it and replace it with a native English word. So for example, somebody who objected to the word escalator because it sounded like it came from Latin. So a good native word of the newspaper ran a contest, and one of the proposals that one was up gang flow for escalator, now, you've never heard that word right. And for good reason, because nobody liked it. But there are a few proposals on terms of getting rid of borrowed words, the word manual for a book of instructions. People started in the 19 century using the word handbook, because in the book is an exact translation of the Latin manual, which has manual dexterity, so all about the hands, that led to the popularity of, of the word handbook, which which was never a big word before, and a few small victories anyway. In that research, I discovered that in the mid 19th century, there were a group of different people inventing coining, gender neutral, or common gender pronouns, because they argued that English has has theirs like a blank space, there's a word missing from our pronoun set of personal pronouns, you know what I we you you there than he she and it is our ours, it's there is no pronoun for the third person singular. That means he or she, that's what that's what they were arguing in the late 18th and early 19th century, we're getting a missing word, there's a missing word. And whenever whenever somebody comes across what I call a semantic black hole in the language, they feel a need to fill that gap. th O N Dawn was coined by a Pennsylvania lawyer who was also a very well known, he wrote a lot of famous 19th century hymns. And his name was Charles C Crozet. Charles Crozet converse, cc converse, he created th O N, which he pronounced Yvonne, the blend of that, and one, and it could stand for he or she, his or her lungs would be his or her. And he said, If you don't know, the gender of the person you're talking about, I don't know, if it's a man or a woman, they were thinking binary in those days, okay. And you use the wrong gender. We didn't have the word Miss gender in those days. But But that could create if you're writing to a client or customer, something like that, oh, and you miss gender than they could take offense proposed a thon as as as a way he, he was into all kinds of modern technology. He was fascinated by the airplane, which was a new thing in the 1880s. And he said, Vaughn was an aerodynamic word, it would make language so much more efficient, just like we did we design can make flying more efficient. So that was particularly and it actually attracted national attention to a lot of newspapers throughout the country had articles about Don, either supporting it or saying it was a it was like the worst thing. A lot of people don't like sliced bread, right? And simple said, Well, I don't like THON, but the idea is right, we need a word. Here's my proposal. And so somebody said, How about IP, IP, then it wins my my award for the cutest pronoun that was calling, these are all in the, in the mid 1900s of these things pop up. And at the time, this is 40 years ago, I recorded about 40 proposals, pre 1900 proposals for for these, they called them common gender, we would call them either gender neutral or inclusive. Or today we use the word non binary, because we're talking in the last 20 years or more about a kind of sliding scale of gender or, or trying to include people who don't consider themselves on the gender binary, but are some other variant then he or she or some combination of he or she, then about five years ago, I got wind of some attempts to digitize a lot of early newspapers, the Library of Congress has, has something called Chronicling America just got digitized versions of small town, and big town American newspapers from the 19th and early 20th century. I said, Well, I'd like to explore this archive, it's free to use online, and what better thing to do than try to see if there were some other pronouns, because I thought that was a kind of nicely limited search I had found a few long ago, maybe I'd find a few more, I found 200 More in the space of about three months, just clicking on early newspapers, and all of these before the 1970s, many of them in the 19th century, a lot of them in the early 20th century 1900 to 1930. So there was this fantastic interest in this missing word z herzer himer. Here. M The earliest one I found a doctor had just gotten his MD from Yale, in 1840. And apparently, business was slow because in 1841, he published a grammar of English and in that and it says Dr. Wright, in this grammar of English he's he's got what he calls a masculine or feminine pronoun, capital E, just the letter E and then it's what we would call inclusive or gender neutral, possibly even intersex or something like yeah, he's either she has masculine or feminine, was an old Latin description for hermaphrodite someone who combined both masculine and feminine Bob, this is the earliest point pronoun that I found ie the the possessive is E S S, and the object form is m e m, and this is 1841. There's only one copy that I have been able to find of his grammar book. It's in the Yale University Library, and it's there because he sent them a copy. They didn't even know they had it. I found it online, emailed the Yale library said I'd like to come and take a look at this They said we didn't even know we had this thing. And when they discovered it, they said, Oh, we better put this in the rare book section. Because it's a one of a kind, one of the cons, but they did let me come and take photographs of the, of the entry for that pronoun. Anyway. This doctor Brewster was what's his name, coined the pronoun 1841. In the 1870s. He's still writing to newspapers saying, Hey, guys, I coined this pronoun for 40 years ago, and nobody's using it through my book, nobody continued to use it. What was reinvented by multiple people, between 1841 and the presence who is several people said, every letter, every vowel has its own word, all the indefinite article I, the first person singular pronoun, oh, the exclamation, oh, you well, second person pronoun. It's not really just a letter, but why not II has nothing assigned to it. Let's let's give it the common gender pronoun.
See the whole, the whole thing about the book was there's all these unresolved gender issues floating around with the pronoun system. So even in the 19th century, people were not happy with the common notion that the masculine pronoun includes the feminine, right the what we call today, the generic masculine that that he includes she She includes it. It was an old grammatical trope that English borrowed from Latin grammar, even though English grammar is very different from Latin. But but the people said, look, there's all these all these arguments that he includes she, but then there are all these exceptions when you say okay, if an American suffragists noticed this of supporters of the women's vote in the 19 century in 1876, was a big thing in American politics, women start to agitate for the vote. A number of states allowed women to vote a number of the territories allowed women to vote before the 19th Amendment was passed, granting voting status. Regardless of sex feminists started arguing suffragists started arguing in the 1870s. If he in the voting law, voting law refers to the voter is he and if he's supposed to include sheet that means we can vote. But the courts will the judges were men, the legislators, older legislators, were men federal and state there were there were no women in the legislature really into the later 19th or early 20th century, no women in Congress until till the early 20th century, they said no, no voting is a privilege. He includes she in the law when referring to an obligation like you have to pay your taxes taxpayer. Taxpayer he Well, that includes women because women have to pay their taxes or the criminal right if a murderer he a couple of couple of famous cases in the night in the 20th century were women convicted of murder said we can't You can't convict me because the law says the the murderer is masculine male is used as the man a woman so I guess that didn't convince any judges to let them off the hook.
Andy Earle
You talked about English being a binary language, what does what do you mean by that?
Dennis Baron
So when we talk about gender in terms of grammar, okay, you English has very few instances of gender compared to other languages. Have you ever studied French or Spanish or German or Latin in school, that these languages have complex gender systems for the nouns all nouns are masculine or feminine, in French and Italian, and in German and Latin, the masculine feminine and neuter? So it gets gets complicated, especially if you're used to English which has very little gender and in those languages, adjectives have to agree in gender and number. That's not just the nouns it's not just the pronouns very complicated grammatical system. In English gender exists only in the case of some nouns which have masculine and feminine forms like actor, actress, waiter, waitress, king, queen, those those those sorts of things and they tend to split But along a masculine feminine binary in other words there's too You're either one or the other there's there's no neutral option and during the 1970s when a second wave feminists started pushing for making English less sexist as the language so we're getting away from from the binaries like actor actress the seem to settle on the term actor to cover both male and female stars now there's some some pressure to figure out what to do about trans categories of of acting make a space for for people who don't fit on the binary waiter waitress or there was a time when the word wait Tron had a little bit of sounded a little bit robotic we person Yeah. But but now I think the industry has kind of settled on the word server or yeah, definitely yeah, if you're looking for a neutral word that doesn't reflect gender at all server I'll be your server tonight is seems to be one the common expression so steward stewardess for the flight attendants, as the flight attendants seems to be the word that the neutral word, the non non binary non in a totally inclusive kind of kind of thing. One of my first public tasks to talk about gender. When I started teaching at the University of Illinois back in 1975, was I had to give a presentation in front of the Faculty Senate, about why the word chair was an appropriate replacement for Chairman and Chairwoman as the name for the head of a committee. And I get up there and try to explain about inclusive language and non sexist language and, and stuff like the predictable bunch of old fogies get up and say, what's the English language but the English language or you can't change? But of course you can. It changes all the time.
Andy Earle
Well, that's one thing I really took away from your book is just how constantly the language is changing, and you try to say what it is, but what what does that even mean? Or what's good or bad or right or wrong? And well, yeah,
Dennis Baron
I mean, I, over the years developed a few of what I call barons laws of English, one of them is the more somebody objects to a particular form, if you listen to them long enough, they will use that form. So one of the one of the things that people used to object to a lot was the use of singular they use the pronoun they which is technically plural, to refer to one individual, give you an example of somebody called for you Oh, did they leave a message they write somebody is technically singular, they technically plural, the so called grammatical pure says you can't do that around in rest in gray and gender in over they is plural and somebody singular, can't, can't do the English has been using they as a singular since the 14th century, it's it's like almost as soon as the word they enters the English language, which is probably not till the 11th or 12th century, it starts being used as a singular as well as a plural and people who object to say that that's grammatically wrong. It's nonsense. Because people have been using it automatically. It's idiomatic English. It makes perfect sense. Everybody knows what you're talking about. well respected writers have used it throughout the centuries. Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen, you name them. They're using singular like
Andy Earle
what is interesting is what you're supposed to say. It's like the he or she, in that example?
Dennis Baron
Yeah. Use the generic masculine. He but what if it's, what if it's what he or she nobody likes the he or she option? He or she? It's binary. But everybody says, Oh, it's too awkward. It's too ugly. It's too long. It's too he or she wants his or her sent to his or her address. You get wound up in all of these Oles phrases. So nobody likes that that was the universally universally rejected or nobody likes the non gendered word it either it is in when it refers to people is typically insulting. Yeah, it feels non human or something and it's not Yeah, it dehumanizes the DISA It used to be it used to be more common to refer to infants whose gender wasn't immediately obvious, is it the baby, it's that that fell out of favor in the 1960s 1970s started to send it to impersonal babies or actual people, as well. So, so that just it just never really caught on and to use its to refer to a grown person was always considered an insult. It's a way of way of dehumanizing somebody that you're talking about of 19th century politicians used to refer to their opponents as it is as an insult.
Andy Earle
We're here with Dennis Baron talking about pronouns. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.
Dennis Baron
Red states passing laws forbidding the use of false pronouns referring to anybody with a pronoun that doesn't reflect the gender they were assigned at birth to the point where they have to get parent bringing a note bringing a note bringing in note, what is school about schools about bringing in a note or your parents saying that's okay. Otherwise, the teacher will have to call your Joseph Oh, if you don't have that note on file. It's one thing to say singular they what happens if you think about a known person, like pick a name any name Charlie, Charlie likes their hamburger with onions, but no tomato. It's okay when the day is close to Charlie. But what happens if you've got a couple of Charlie ordered a burger, they weren't happy with the burger that came? And people say, Well, that sounds a little stranger. To that I say. Language has all kinds of ambiguity built into it. There's also ways that we have of disambiguating of clarifying. Just watching an old inspector Lewis on TV, one of the characters says you are never one of us social class distinction, we you. So pronouns are always both inclusive and exclusive. So your choice in using pronouns, whether you want to honor somebody's pronouns, and be inclusive, or where whether you want to reject their pronouns and exclude them from the discourse because we use language negatively as well as positively. We use language to insult people. We use language to hurt people that seems to be one of the built in parts of language is not very nice, and it's not going away either.
Andy Earle
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