Anonymous User, you said that you want to get into MIT. Well, if so, you’re going to have to learn to do good research. You’re a reasonably good writer, but you’ve got a lot to learn about how to do research. First, the fact that something comes up as the top item on the list when you put a term into Google doesn’t mean that it’s recommending that term, let alone an official permission to use the term. Google generally tells you about nothing except how commonly the term is used on the Internet. Look at the relative number of Google hits you get for “hir” as opposed to “her”. There are twenty times as many hits for “her” and most of the hits for “hir” are abbreviations for other things, so the imbalance is really much greater. This means that “hir” isn’t at all common, at the very least.
Then look at the Wikipedia entry that’s the second thing that comes up in a search for “hir”. (Wikipedia isn’t perfect for research. In particular, don’t use it as a reference in the footnotes to the papers you write in high school or at MIT, if you get there, because it’s not considered a primary source.) You can see that “hir” is barely mentioned in the article of gender-neutral pronouns (which is mostly about gender-neutral pronouns in English). Nothing in it says that “hir” is official. In fact, there isn’t such a thing as being official in language use. (There are academies in some languages that try to define themselves as being the arbitrators of what’s officially in the language, but it’s more common for those academies to be ignored than you might think.) You might then try a lot of dictionaries to see if any of them accept it. As kunilou showed, not a single dictionary that he consulted accepted it.
My personal recommendation is that you don’t want to use it in anything that a school will see. Don’t use it in your high school papers. Don’t use it in papers you write at MIT. Don’t use it in your application to MIT. The most likely thing is that the person who reads those things won’t even recognize the word. The second most likely thing is that they will recognize it and decide you’re an annoying person trying to show how hip and liberal you are. The chances that they will be impressed by it is quite small.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Here’s a Merriam-Webster ‘ask the editor’ video discussing gender versus number in pronouns. According to them, the use of ‘their’ as a singular pronoun is centuries old.
If you used it in my language arts class I’d get my red pen out, and it’s also not something I would use casually. I write he/she or i write he or she.
Oh, sure, I understand that. But the more pedantic types don’t like it, so if I’m trying to be extra conservative or careful (or adhering to a stylebook where it’s proscribed against), I’ll either make sure I cast everything in the plural to agree with “they/them/their” constructions or I’ll d do the “he or she” or “one” thing or whatever seems least awkward and most appropriate.
I would never ever use “hir” to refer to a real person, unless they (sie) explicitly wanted to be referred to that way. I’ve never personally known anyone that identifies as hermaphroditic, at least in real life. Known a few that use “hir” for their online personas.
If I need a gender-neutral pronoun, “they” works fine.
Just wondering, why is the majority against the use of the words “hir” and “zhe”. Personally, I think they’re cool (and I have already started using them). It shows that the English language is still evolving.
There’s plenty of neologisms (among other aspects of the language) that show English is evolving. There are no shortage of new words in our language.
I think there’s a few things going. Reflexively, they just look like stupid words to me. They look artificial and “unEnglish” in the way they’re constructed. And how do you pronounce “hir” differently than “her” in the spoken word? And the “zh” digraph is not really natural in English orthography, either. They just look like made-up words, in my opinion.
Plus most dialects already have a naturally evolved way of dealing with this, like using the plural "you’ and gender-neutral singular. I personally find no need to use confusing words like “hir” and “zhe” as “them” and “they” already exist and satisfactorily fulfil the role.
I also think, and I’m thinking out loud here, that pronouns in English may also be especially resistent to change. After all, they’re one of the few places in our language where we retain a case system and are some of the oldest words still used in the English language. I’m not exactly sure why this is, maybe because it’s such a small set of specialized words or something else. That said, I guess there are words like “youse” and “y’all” and “yinz” that have wiggled their way into some parts of our language, so my thesis might be completely specious.
I’m not against the use of them, per se, I just wouldn’t use them because I don’t know anyone that would WANT to be referred to as “hir” or “zhe”. By far the dominant use of the words, in my experience, is in a science fiction setting to refer to a hermaphrodite, or some other more-than-binary gender. They’re not gender-neutral, they refer to non-male, non-female genders that basically don’t exist in real life.* Using “hir” just because gender is unknown or ambiguous rubs me the wrong way.
In real life, people generally identify as male or female, with “no gender” coming in at a distant third. People identifying as hermaphroditic, multi-gendered, or some other complication where “hir” would be appropriate are so vanishingly rare that you’ll probably never encounter them without going looking. And if you do, then go ahead and use “hir.”
(*) Yes, “hir” has been proposed for use as a gender neutral pronoun, but as far as I know it never really got used that way. It DID get adopted for sci-fi herm type stuff, and usage trumps intention.
You started by asking if the word “hir” had become official and now you’re defending it because you think it’s cool. Look, if you want to use it in your blog or in articles you write for your school paper, that’s fine. You’ll still probably have to explain it when you first use it, since very few people know what it means. Don’t use it in papers you turn in in high school or college. Don’t use it in college applications. They won’t be impressed by your attempts to act cool.
Words enter the language when a sufficiently large percentage of people agree that they’re cool. Useful isn’t enough. English has desperately needed a word for non-married spouse for the more than four decades since living together became too common to be ignored, and none of the suggestions (boyfriend/girlfriend, significant other, POSSLQ, lover) have worked. Gender-neutral pronouns sound silly to almost everybody. And why should anyone use your favorites out of the dozens that have been coined? “They” is familiar, has been used in this sense for hundreds of years, and offends only the silliest of pedants. We have a solution, IOW, and when the pedants die off, nobody will be left to oppose it and no new terms will be needed.
I only know one transgendered person and I don’t think I’ve ever heard her use anything but the typical masculine and feminine pronouns. I wonder if people get transgendered confused with gender queer individuals. I don’t think I’ve ever met a gender queer person.
The problem is that using “hir” will signal more than just that you’re liberal if you use it in an essay in a college application. First, even most liberals won’t recognize it. Second, using it is not like talking in that essay about how you founded a tutoring service for inner-city children that had already allowed thousands of students who would otherwise have dropped out of school to so much improve their grades that they were admitted to Ivy League colleges. That would be actually doing something for somebody. Using an expression that hardly anybody knows would more likely show the admissions committee that you like showing off more than doing something. Maybe somebody on that committee would recognize the term, but they might consider it to be you claiming that you are a wonderful advocate of gender equality even though you don’t do anything about it.
I am unopposed to such words, just as I have no opposition to - and cannot imagine why anyone would object to - the use of the word “flumnek,” which means “the collection of small bits of trash from food packaging that collects around a computer desk or workstation.” The reason I would not use such terms is that since 99% of people do not recognize them as words, I would be doing a terrible job of communicating.
Also, deliberately contrived vocabulary for the sake of making a point tends to not catch on very well unless people see a good reason to do so, an advantage to it. You want to make the language more inclusive of women,you can do so by including women (“his or her”), not by neutering the language. And if we insist on a gender-neutral term, we can use the ones we already have (the “generic they”) until enough people find a neologism more useful.
“Ms” being an example of that. It was socially awkward trying to guess if a woman should be referred to as Miss or Mrs; Ms eliminated that problem. Gender is usually much more obvious than whether or not someone is married.
And the interrobang being an example of something deliberately contrived (in this case a punctuation mark) that failed to catch on because there was really no reason for it. Really, how often do you want to end a sentence with both a ? and a ! but believe it’s important to save a space?
Well, my high school english teacher would consider the second terminal punctuation to be an error so the interrobang would have been a life-saver. Of course, he would have considered the interrobang to be an error in and of itself so no real gain here.