He she sie? [View all]

[cyclonefence]

This discussion thread was locked by EarlG (a host of the General Discussion forum).

I am in favor of referring to people in their preferred manner. I confess to having a lot of trouble with "they" as a singular pronoun, not so much when I use it because I know who I'm referring to, but when I encounter it from others, especially in written text. It causes an interruption in the flow of ideas because I have to pause to remind myself who is being referred to.

This is not the biggest problem in the world.

Many years ago, there was a movement to replace "he" and "she" (and their iterations) with a neutral pronoun that could be applied to either sex (it was a binary world back then, at least to those of us ignorant of our non-binary citizens), and the word "sie" was suggested. I actually used it for a while, but grew tired of explaining.

English is not an inflected language; that is, we do not change the spelling of words to indicate whether the words are masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are assigned gender and generally have different spellings for male or female words. In French, "chance" (luck) is feminine, and "Good luck" is rendered "Bonne chance", with the feminine adjective matching the feminine noun. "Bon voyage" and "bon appetit" reflect masculine endings to adjectives that modify masculine nouns.

We don't go in for that nonsense. "Good luck", "good travels", and "enjoy your dinner" don't kowtow to the gender of the noun.

So why do our pronouns have to be divided into male and female? Why don't we have one word to mean "person?" Not just to make things easier with the nonbinary community, but to make it fairer and more sensible for all of us?

You wouldn't have to mess with the plural pronouns, I think: "they" and "them" are just fine. But let's find a new word for him/her/person.