Revisited: Is there a gender-neutral substitute for "his or her"?

If you were to take a poll of people, I think you would find yourself to be quite unordinairy. Good unordinairy, but unordinairy none the less. :slight_smile:

No takers? C’mon! - what is the thing called that is depicted in the link?

It appears to be a dog. Is this a trick question?

Sexist! It’s a bitch. Although some might also object to calling it that, as it seems fairly even-tempered.

Well I am not given to closely examining the groinal areas of animals so the lack of male accoutrements wasn’t something I noticed :stuck_out_tongue:

I brought it up to illustrate the strangeness of some of the arguments here; words don’t always have just one meaning, but they are often used to mean strictly one of their multiple meanings, so calling the animal in the picture ‘dog’ is ambiguous, but reflects no underlying prejudice; likewise, calling it ‘bitch’ is ambiguous, but reflects no underlying malice.

William Safire had a series of “On Language” columns in the New York Times Sunday magazine covering this issue. It boiled down to using gender neutral titles, only using gender inclusive words when it’s relevant to the discussion (which it usually is not), and then using the adjectives “male” and “female.”

Who cares?

Oh yeah, feminists.

The problem with using plural pronouns to refer to persons in a gender-neutral way (everyone open their book) is that it makes it unclear whether the subject is singular or plural.

This seems minor now, but it will become just as big an issue in the future, when cloning has created plural individuals. Then we won’t be able to say “They did it” without offending a singular being, or “it did it” without sounding offensively pluralist.

Sailboat

is re-resurrection male or female?

A few things on this topic:

  1. “He”, “him”, and “his” are masculine. “She”, “her”, and “hers” are feminine.

  2. This topic focuses on the existence or use of a gender-neutral pronouns. This is not actually relevant, as we have had them for hundreds of years, and there is, as far as I am aware, no significant disagreement on what they are or what they are used for. The gender-neutral pronouns in English are “it” and “its”. This issue is therefor not about gender-neutral pronouns at all, but rather pronouns describing a subject of unspecified or indeterminate gender. The subject will of course still have a gender, even if we do not know what it is, which is why we don’t refer to people as “it”.

  3. Gender-indeterminate subjects allow for several constructs. “He or she” can be used. It is certainly not incorrect, but it is unnecessary and laboured. “He/she”, while also not incorrect, is awkward in both speech and writing, and is even more perceptibly stilted than “he or she”. The best way to specify a gender-indeterminate subject is, for a number of reasons , to use “singular ‘they’”, and I would prescribe this usage almost exclusively. There are some instances where using one of the “he or she” models helps to provide clarity that, in that particular sentence, singular they might not. This sort of situation, however, has nothing specifically to do with the actual words or their syntax, but is instead a result of the frequent ambiguity inherent to many aspects of English.

  4. A fourth available option, if you really want to call it an option, is the use of constructed words, such as the Spivac pronouns ey, em, eir, and eirs. While these words can certainly be used, their drawbacks, such as an inability to clearly express thoughts, are detrimental to a degree that eliminates the pronouns as an acceptable or realistic option. Such artificial pronouns are blatantly distracting and, perhaps even more importantly, irreparably contrived.

  5. Not pertaining to this topic specifically, but someone mentioned above that words have genders and people have sexes, and that you can’t necessarily substitute one for the other.

Part of that is true. Sex and gender cannot be switched arbitrarily, but it’s not because people have one and words have another other, it’s because they have different definitions in different contexts, and using the wrong one can change the meaning of a statement. Also contrary to that post, people, generally speaking, have both sexes and genders (although, if you want to be really, really technically correct, people do not have sexes, only genders).

Waitron?

whoa… is this getting resurrected and me returning a coincidence? Or a sign of the apocalypse? I said I wouldn’t return to this thread, but hey, it’s been a year.

“Madam Chairman” sounds perfectly alright to me. I don’t think a 'woman" is a man who sits on a wo, do I?

I think the solution to the problem is to enlist black people. If there’s someone who can come up with a workable alternative and get kids to use, it’s them. Ey, em, eyrs was obviously invented by a white guy. Dammit, black people, don’t let us down.

I think that depends on which side of the word one was on.

Sailboat

To be fair, “mexican” is today more often used with hatred on the mind than “nigger.” At one point in the past, “negro” was not offensive at all (it’s just the word “black” in spanish). ‘Nigger’ was probably always said with some offense, but it started off fairly mild too. Then language changed, and language will change again. “Man from Mexico” can be a racial slur if people will use it like one, and words like “he” can include everyone, if people just use them that way. Many people on this thread just didn’t understand how language works.

It’s strange that people should misunderstand their own language, because English has a fat share of homonyms (words that are said or spelled the same, but have entirely different meanings, such as the words “do,” “do,” “do,” and “due”). Of course, the fact they weren’t really aware of it, is precisely why it doesn’t matter! Just because an immigrant learning English might get confused, doesn’t mean Americans are.

Anyway, I think we as a society have largely abandoned this game for this reason.