Sex and the Personal Pronoun

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Hamlet, Act 2, Scene II

Words are my element, as water is to a fish, or air to a bird. Words are what I work with, by day as a lawyer, by night as a copy editor. Words have been in my mind since before I can remember. And they fill my brain like a rush-hour bus, with barely standing room between them, and the next stop far away.

So I care about them. And I care about those who use them, but principally the authors for whom I copy edit, and of course the readers who will read them. Those who read my words by day, and reward me or denigrate me, comprise a different category altogether. They too are my element; they are the sea from which I hope to catch my livelihood, but like all fishers, I know better than to trust any too much to the sea. Many shoals and storms have taught me better.

So words are on my mind and in my understanding. And what I'm lamenting just now is the want of certain words, whose absence make precision clumsy or, worse, makes prolixity a necessity.

I mean the want of a third person singular possessive adjective, and a third person singular personal pronoun, both of which are gender-neutral, although even the phrase "gender-neutral" offends me.

For the possessive adjective here, we have "his" and "her" and "its" (the last-named, please, without the damned apostrophe; it reminds me of George Ade's immortal line, "'Whom are you?' she asked, for she had been to Night School."). But each of those bespeaks a gender, masculine, feminine or neuter. What price a gender-neutral word? I hate to read, much less to write, a clumsy sentence like "The reader must make up his or her own mind about this story."

When I was learning English grammar, shortly after the Ice Age, I was taught (by graduates of the Roman Catholic parochial school system who had escaped both marriage and the convent) that the default was "his", when gender was neutral, as in "The reader must make up his mind about this story."

Needless to say this was before school integration, the civil rights and the women's rights movements. Today, of course, such a locution would banish one to the Ninth Circle of Sexist Hogs, where there would be weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So what then must we do? There have been attempts to invent neutral words, like "hir", as in "The reader must make up hir mind about this story." Neutral, but artificial, without flavor, made up to suit the times like the Carnaby Street hiphuggers of days gone by; fit only for the lovers of precious antiques, and frequenters of thrift shops and estate sales.

But that may be the best we can do (God help us!). I had hoped, and still hope, for better.

Likewise a good third person, neutral of course, singular personal pronoun is necessary. "This story raises a lot of questions for the thoughtful reader, and s/he must make up hir mind about each of them." The locution "s/he" is intrusive, obtrusive and downright irritating, and to add the neologism "hir" makes the sentence exasperating.

Yet what is the solution? "Hi" is ridiculous and confusing; worse, it is as ill-mannered as someone walking into a conversation, and interrupting the speaker and listener with a greeting "Hi!"; "si" sounds like Spanish or Italian and is more confusing. Nobody has devised better, and so sentences that need to be precise and concise stumble over the forward-slashed pronoun, and nearly fall flat. Worse still is "he or she", or even more self-consciously, "she or he". The author vaunts and flaunts hir gender-neutrality to the exclusion of all else, and syntax be damned! To say nothing of lean, well-crafted prose, which is disemboweled on the altar of assumed political correctness.

Note, before the politically correct rise up as one mammal (mustn't be speciesist, y'know) to tie me to the stake reserved for heretics of the worst kind and light the fire prepared for those who do not worship at the right altar, I am not advocating a return to the masculine default. Those days are gone for good, and I do not lament them. What I lament is circumlocution and stumbling prose where the words should stride, bold and free, across the reader's consciousness, with Katherine Bates' "firm, impassioned stress".

I remember Mark Twain's comment about gender in German (and oh! when I was learning that language, imperfectly of course, it often came to mind). "Ah, woeful, woeful Ash-heap! Let us take him up tenderly, reverently, upon the lowly Shovel, and bear him to his long Rest, with the Prayer that when he rises again it will be a Realm where he will have one good square responsible Sex, and have it all to himself, instead of having a mangy lot of assorted Sexes scattered all over him in Spots."

I hope that someone, reading this, may find the new mots justes I am so eagerly awaiting.