Editor’s note: Welcome to InDepthNH.org’s new column Speaking of Words. Michael Ferber retired from the English Department at UNH, but has plenty more to say and write about words. We are thrilled he wants to do that for our readers. Welcome Michael! – Nancy West

By MICHAEL FERBER, Speaking of Words

        Twice in the last fifty years or so we who speak English, and especially we who write English, have been pressed to change what pronouns we use when referring to a person of unknown gender.  Until late in the last century the “correct” pronoun, the one we were taught in school and saw in writing almost everywhere, was “he” or “him,” the so-called neutral or generic use of the masculine pronoun.  For fifty years, however, a growing number of careful writers have avoided it because it does not seem neutral much of the time, and today it is unusual to find it.  Some writers have substituted “she” for “he,” and that might have been useful for a while to jog people out of the old convention, but it now seems dated as well, and serves mainly to signal a writer’s social or political virtue.

        It then seemed perfectly correct to write “he or she,” though it sounded a little fussy.  True, it puts “he” before “she,” so some writers reversed the order sometimes—again to make a point, though the point may have had nothing to do with the subject at hand.

        But this question has been superseded for several years now by a more difficult one.  Quite a few people do not consider themselves either “he” or “she”; they may feel they are both, or neither, and if neither, then certainly not neuter, not “it.”  Among academic and progressive social groups it is becoming the custom to specify what pronouns the writer or speaker prefers, even if they are the traditional ones.  So what pronoun is available for those who find “he” and “she” inadequate? 

        English used to mark all its nouns masculine, feminine, or neuter, like German or Russian, but today the last trace of the three-gender system is its set of third-person-singular pronouns.  English never marked the third-person-plural pronoun, unlike the Romance languages (as with French ils and elles), so “they/them/their” has been recruited for the unmarked singular.  Long before the recent recognition of non-binary people’s linguistic rights, “they/them/their” had been established as normal when the gender was unknown.  “Someone left their wallet behind.”  “If anyone insults you, ignore them.”  That older usage is not the same as this newer one, where we know the person in question, but it has paved the way for it.

        So now we have a serious dilemma.  If we believe, as I do, that we should not impose a standard pronoun on those it does not fit, then we must find another pronoun that does.  I have seen dozens of “neo-pronoun” proposals (yo, ey, fae, thon, tha, etc.), but none of them has caught on, and none is likely to.  “They/them/their” is here to stay.  And that usage breeds lots of confusions that its advocates tend to slight.  “They” is plural and has been plural for centuries.  English-speakers have a well ingrained habit, when they hear or read “they” or “them,” of referring back to a plural noun, and if they find one or not, they will be disconcerted by discovering that they were sent on a wild-goose chase. 

        Those who care about the English language, at least when they write and have time to think, can take measures to avoid having to choose a singular pronoun, as I have done in this sentence, for if I had written “Anyone who cares about the English language, at least when”—woops!  I would have been stuck.  And when we write about a named person who asks to be referred to as they/them/their, we can sometimes repeat that person’s name, but to do so repeatedly is awkward and unnatural.

        Some languages, by the way, have worse problems than we do.  German, though it retains the old three-gender system, resembles English in that it does not mark its third-person plural pronoun for gender: sie means “they” of any gender.  Unfortunately, sie also means “she” and, capitalized, the polite form of “you,” so it cannot be recruited for the indefinite singular without causing havoc.  What will the Germans do?  Among the expedients now in use is a new pronoun dey, which is borrowed from English “they”!  I’m glad we can help them.

        Here is what I think will happen in English because of the damage the singular “they” will inevitably cause: “they” will become the unmarked singular and we will create a new unmarked plural.  A close analogy, though it did not involve gender, is what happened long ago after the plural “you” displaced the singular “thou” and “thee” (as well as the plural “ye”).   The lack of a contrast between singular and plural in the second person has been widely felt as a problem, and so we have many new constructions: “you all” (or “y’all”), “you guys,” “y’uns,” “you lot,” even “youse.” 

        I predict then, though I will be long dead before it happens, that new strictly plural forms will arise: perhaps “th’all” or “themall.”  Or perhaps “theys/thems/theirs’s.”  Theys don’t sound very attractive, but when one of thems is settled on and we get used to it, we will have solved our pronoun problem.  But don’t hold your breath.

Michael Ferber

I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.

        Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, where he taught until he retired in 2018.  Besides English literature he has given courses in classics, the Bible, and linguistics.  Before coming to UNH he taught at Yale and then worked at the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC.  He lives with his wife, Susan Arnold, in Strafford; they have a daughter in California.