It’s been a big year for singular they, but there’s more than one pronoun in town.
What invented pronouns have there been? How far back does singular they go? And why did some people kick up a fuss about singular you?
We’re talking to pronoun expert Dennis Baron on this episode of Talk the Talk.
Listen to this episode
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Daniel and Tom chat ahead of the show, and they play the Random Prince Song game.
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/34128392
Reflections on 394: What’s Your Pronoun?
Welcome to… Reflections. 🎹♫
There are a few people who I get really excited about interviewing, and this week I have one.
See, in my classes when I’ve talked about the quest for a gender-neutral pronoun in English, I’ve always used this article from 2010 by Dennis Baron.
The gender-neutral pronoun: after 150 years still an epic fail
Before reading this, I’d had no idea that invented pronouns went back so far — the 1800s? really? And in all that time, they still haven’t had much success.
But Dr Baron’s influence didn’t stop with that article. He’s kept going, unearthing loads of information from old books and periodicals about gender-neutral pronouns. And he puts all that up on his Twitter account, which you should be following.
I’ve been waiting for him to release a book with everything he’s learned. And now he’s gone and done it, and the book is What’s Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She. We had a big ol’ chat about it, and we had a great time. I think the casual nature of the chat comes through in the recording.
Only one thing. Can you believe I actually forgot to ask Dr Baron what his pronoun is? Maybe I missed an opportunity, or maybe it would have been a hackneyed question that anyone could have asked, and my mind just doesn’t traffic in clichés. Yeah. That.
Also at https://www.patreon.com/posts/reflections-on-34096807
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Show notes
‘She’ goes missing from presidential language
https://phys.org/news/2020-01-presidential-language.html
‘She’ goes missing from presidential language: Even when people believed Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election, they did not use ‘she’ to refer to the next president — ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200108160307.htm
New Dog Collar Swears When Dog Barks
https://wzlx.iheart.com/content/2020-02-14-new-dog-collar-swears-when-dog-barks/
Dennis Baron: What’s Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She
https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631496042
Dr. Pronoun will set you straight | COMMENTARY – Baltimore Sun
https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/columnists/mcintyre/bs-ed-mcintyre-20200119-ehun367tq5fh3h2flx2k3pkkmu-story.html
Baron: The gender-neutral pronoun: after 150 years still an epic fail | The Web of Language
https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/31097
A brief history of singular ‘they’ | Oxford English Dictionary
https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/
The Atlantic’s Case for the Singular, Gender-Neutral ‘They’—in 1879 – The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/12/the-atlantics-case-for-the-singular-gender-neutral-theyin-1879/419433/
Trebuchet | Definition of Trebuchet by Merriam-Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trebuchet
Trebuchet | Definition of Trebuchet at Dictionary.com
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trebuchet?s=t
Trebuchet Memes
https://www.reddit.com/r/trebuchetmemes/
trebuchet | Sesquiotica
https://sesquiotic.com/2020/02/13/trebuchet/
Why Do Mirrors Reverse Left and Right?
https://www.wired.com/2011/08/why-do-mirrors-reverse-left-and-right/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Daniel: The following is an RTRFM Podcast. RTRFM is a community organization and relies on volunteer and listener support. To learn more about what we do, visit our rtrfm.com.au.
[Talk the Talk theme music]
Daniel: I’m Daniel Midgley, and this is Talk the Talk.
[theme music ends]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Talk the Talk RTRFM’s weekly show about linguistics, the science of language where we bring you the best of what’s happening in the linguistics world. And I’m not alone. I’ve got a very special guest. It’s Professor Dennis Baron of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [chuckles] Why did I say that? Does everyone say that?
Dennis: No.
Daniel: [laughs] It’s just me.
Dennis: This is a first. They mispronounce Urbana a lot. Orbana. It’s Urbana.
Daniel: Oh, really, this is one of those–[crosstalk].
Dennis: Nice edge. The Urba–
Daniel: Urbana.
Dennis: Urbana.
Daniel: This is a bit like Spokane.
Dennis: It is neither urbane nor whatever the adjective for champagne is. [laughs]
Daniel: It’s a college town, it must be a little bit urbane.
Daniel: It is a little bit of urbane. But it’s nestled in the center of the state amid a sea of corn and soybeans. And a lot of Republicans, it’s a red state.
Daniel: Well, I also come from a small college town that is surrounded by farmland. So, if it’s as picturesque as Eastern Washington, then it must be a lovely place.
Dennis: It’s not picturesque at all. Nobody comes here for the geography, the shopping, or the weather.
Daniel: Just to study.
Dennis: Yeah.
Daniel: Okay, fantastic. Well, thank you for coming on the air and telling us about your book, which is what we’re going to talk about in the main section. It’s What’s Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She, so I’m really looking forward to talking to you because I’ve been aware of your work in this area for a really, really, really long time.
Dennis: That means I’m really, really old.
Daniel: Me too.
Dennis: [laughs]
Daniel: Awesome. Okay, well, let’s start out with the news. I noticed this story, and it was right up my alley, and I thought it might be right up yours. This is about the word she as it relates to presidents, specifically of the United States. I’m looking at some work from Titus von der Malsburg of the University of Potsdam, Germany.
Now, they were looking at the US 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, I remember it well. [Dennis chuckles] And they were specifically looking at the pronouns used to describe the president before people knew who was going to be president. What they expected was that when it looked like Hillary Clinton was more likely to win, and people were discussing the president, that the word she would be used more often, after all, that’s what happened in England when it looked like Theresa May would be Prime Minister.
Over a period of months, they got people to complete this sentence. “The next US President will be sworn into office in January 2017. After moving into the Oval Office, one of the first things that.” Now I would have predicted that she would go up because it seemed sensible, I guess.
Dennis: Absolutely.
Daniel: I would have also expected a lot of singular THEY.
Dennis: Yes.
Daniel: But that didn’t happen. Early on in the piece, people used “he” about 25% of the time, but “they” about half the time. Then when it looked like Clinton was going to win, you’d expect “she” to come up, and it just didn’t.
Dennis: It didn’t.
Daniel: Singular THEY did go up to about 60%.
Dennis: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: Is that kind of what you would have expected?
Dennis: No, not at all.
Daniel: Oh.
Dennis: I would have thought that the pronoun would go with the person. In this case, it didn’t end. Their suggestion was, in terms of how do you read the results of this that people are still a little bit uncomfortable with the idea of a woman in the White House as president. And in that way, it sort of fits a historical pattern because people have been– segue to the book, people have been arguing about this since 1845, at least. I mean, that’s the earliest one I found in 1845, two American abolitionists got into a tangle in the press about whether “he” the pronoun he in the Constitution in the US Constitution means a woman can’t be president. So, Article II of the American Constitution describes the qualifications that you to have to be president. You have to be 35 years old and you have to be born in the United States. I forget if there’s other stuff. Also, the duties of the president, what the president has to do, and it uses the pronoun he four times or something like that.
There’s one guy, Lysander Spooner, argued that he in the Constitution, he was what we would call in the US, a strict constructionist reading the literal meaning of the text, “He” means a woman can’t be president. And Wendell Phillips countered that another well-known abolitionist at the time, by saying, “Well, look, in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, the one about the right to remain silent, you don’t have to testify against yourself. It uses the masculine pronoun, but no one in the right mind thinks that women don’t have the right to remain silent under police questioning.” Either is gender neutral, it applies to both men and women. And since it’s a settled matter of constitutional interpretation in the US, that if a word means one thing in the Constitution, in one part of the Constitution, it’s got to mean exactly the same thing, if it occurs in another part of the constitution. So, “he” in Article II, has got to include women as well.
Daniel: And did his argument win the day?
Dennis: Neither argument won the day, because they gave up after a while. But [chuckles] the argument that he excludes women was a powerful one in the 19th century. To the point where people would point to laws or regulations and say, “Well, it’s using the masculine pronoun, so a woman can’t vote, can’t become a lawyer, can’t become a doctor, can’t hold elected office. It’s exclusionary.” And so, what happened?
And this, I don’t know, maybe you know what the situation was in Australia, but in England in 1850, they passed the Interpretation Act. In Canada in 1867, another Interpretation Act, and in the US in 1871, the act was called the Dictionary Act. And among its provisions was that if masculine word like he or man occurs in a statute, it includes women. So, they clarified the law saying that he is gender neutral. And so a statute, the references a he, or a man does not exclude women.
Daniel: That’s really interesting, because in my experience, when someone says, “Oh,” he includes he and she. Or man includes men and women. I always think it’s kind of sexist. But in this case, it was kind of the opposite. It wasn’t sexist at all.
Dennis: Well, right. They’re trying to defeat that Lysander Spooner interpretation was that he means he, because in many cases, he obviously did mean she as well. And it was a grammatical rule in terms of textbook learning that these lawmakers had studied in school, that the masculine was what they called at the time that common gender and then included women. There’s obviously an exclusive men only masculine as well. But for legal interpretation, the legislators felt that it would simplify the law, so, you don’t have to explain every time you pass a law that has a he or his or him in it. You don’t have to explain or it could be women as well. And nobody wanted to say he or she, hm or her, his or hers, because everybody thought that was too long, too awkward, too repetitive.
Daniel: I remember that from the 70s and it was too long, too awkward and too repetitive. I’m just wondering, in this study that we’re talking about president she. Do you think people had a hard time with it, because there’s resistance to women presidents in the US or do you think that people had a problem with that because singular THEY is just so well accepted these days?
Dennis: Well, in the 19th century, certainly, they had a problem with both women as presidents and singular THEY, which they decided it was ungrammatical. Most people decided it was ungrammatical. Before the18th century nobody cared singular THEY, plural they, there were no comments about it. But the 18th and 19th century, you see it starting to be marked as a grammatical errors and something to be eradicated. In its place, the grammar books, the usage books, elevated the generic masculine, which they borrowed from a Latin rule for having adjectives agree with nouns. And, of course, that doesn’t work in English.
Daniel: Latin again.
Dennis: Yes, it was the curse of Latin. So, the generic masculine is the rule that was taught in school, but people didn’t want women to be president at the time. They didn’t want women to be governor. They didn’t want women to be elected to anything. They didn’t let women vote. And so, there was opposition to this idea. I imagine if you had conducted this experiment with the president she in 1850, people will say, “Oh, this is counterfactual. [chuckles] This can’t happen.”
Daniel: Yeah. I guess we’re still getting echoes of that. Another thing about the study was that when people read a paragraph where she referred to the president, it caused a little bit of lag time in processing that statement.
Dennis: They hesitated, yeah. Microseconds or milliseconds, but still enough to be significant that this was an unexpected word.
Daniel: Yeah. It still sounds like we have these echoes in the way that we process words and the way that we expect word patterns to happen.
Dennis: Yep. There is this undercurrent, there’s this unstated, whether it’s a slight hesitation when you’re reading the “president she,” and if it means “she” is sort of the unexpected word here, it’s the marked term, or in production when you produce the sentence and produce the utterance you say, “the president he” more like or the “president they” because you just can’t wrap your mouth around the “president she.” Too many people find it strange, and that’s got to go away. That’s got to resolve.
Daniel: Yep. Let’s move on to our last news story, which I’m putting in the category of worst invention in the world. [Dennis chuckles] This is a new dog collar swears when dog barks. This is a battery powered collar that every time your dog barks, according to manufacturer, MSCHF, it will play a random swear word. Lovely.
Dennis: So, is this supposed to get the dog to stop barking or is this supposed to be amusing for barking?
Daniel: I have the feeling that it’s meant to be amusing. The manufacturer says, “We all know your pooch probably has some built up rage for those times that you didn’t come home or skimped pretty hard on his dinner that one night, just let them curse their frustration away.” Which I didn’t notice that but that’s got a singular THEY-
Dennis: Yes.
Daniel: -as well.
Dennis: Oh, yeah singular THEY, it’s all over the place.
Daniel: That’s funny. But I think this is kind of how dogs communicate, having been a dog person.
Dennis: By swearing.
Daniel: By swearing. There was the Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoon where all the dogs were like, “Hey, Hey,” and that’s what dogs are saying. But I feel when another dog walks by the dogs own yard.
Dennis: Hmm.
Daniel: And the dog starts barking. It’s like they’re saying “Hey, FU for being a dog.”
Dennis: Right.
Daniel: I feel like there’s an assumption there that when dogs bark they’re cursing. I’m not sure if barking has the same function as cursing, but I’m not a dog semanticist, so I’m not sure.
Dennis: Right. Yeah, no, we need to get somebody on to talk about this. That’s– [laughs]
Daniel: Well, I did some speech acts, it’s part of my PhD so I should be on this. But it was only English-speaking humans.
Dennis: Right. Dog speech acts are something– I’ve read some of the chimp and gorilla experiments. But dogs? No, not so much.
Daniel: On my list of inventions, I’m putting this just above Truck Nuts[?]. [00:14:12]
Dennis: Okay, do you think that this invention could violate some local anti-swearing regulations?
Daniel: It depends. Maybe they could have a setting where you could choose the swear level.
Dennis: Uh-huh, yeah.
Daniel: Yeah, down the lower levels you got dog–[crosstalk]
Dennis: Right, you got this dog that says, “Oh, sugar,” every time it barks.
Daniel: the Utah setting.
Dennis: Yeah.
Daniel: I like it.
Dennis: I like it.
Daniel: Let’s go into business and scoop them.
Dennis: [chuckles] Yeah.
Daniel: But now we need to take a track. If you have any comments about what you’re hearing, go ahead and send them to us. 92609210 to get me in the studio. Email me right now talkthetalk@rtrfm.com.au over all over the social media, we are on Facebook Talk the Talk Podcast and we are Talkpod on Twitter. But now let’s listen to a track this one’s Burgers of Beef with Never Kicked The Dog on RTRFM 92.1.
You are here on Talk the Talk with me, Daniel Midgley. And it is RTRFM’s weekly show about linguistics, the science of language. And we’re here with a very special guest host, this is Professor Dennis Baron of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Urbha-Urban– no, I said it right. It was Urbana.
Dennis: Yes.
Daniel: We’re talking about his new book. What’s Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She. Dennis, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Dennis: It is great to be on.
Daniel: It has been an absolutely enormous year for singular THEY using they for one person, especially when it’s a person you don’t know or emergingly, a person who is non binary who doesn’t identify strongly with he or she, it’s been the Word of the Year by Merriam-Webster’s, it’s been the word of the Decade by the American Dialect Society. How do we account for all this attention? Has it been a long time coming?
Dennis: I think it almost got an Oscar. I mean–
Daniel: Did it?
Dennis: No, it didn’t.
Daniel: [laughs]
Dennis: It should have.
Daniel: Should have.
Dennis: Yeah, that’ll be nice.
Daniel: Yes.
Dennis: I think that two things are going on here that are converging. One of them is an increasing acceptance of a singular THEY for indefinite, like everybody, somebody, the writer, the student, the radio host…, someone who’s a member of a group member of a class, there’s maybe implied plurality, but you’re talking about one single individual. And in the last 20, 30 years, we have seen a growing acceptance among language authorities of this indefinite singular THEY, style guides, dictionaries, grammar books are more and more have been coming around too, to accepting the singular “they,” which has been a major feature of English since at least 1375, because that’s the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for a singular THEY, they’ve got a couple of citations from that same year. And it certainly does not go back to old English because there were no T-H plural pronouns in Old English, it was a borrowed from the Viking invaders.
Daniel: Was that “hem” back in those days?
Dennis: Yeah. It was “hey,” “hit,” and ‘hel’ for the singular and “he” and “hem” for the plural, but they all started to sound alike for a variety of reasons that if we went into would put your audience completely to sleep. But there was a lot of ambiguity in the pronoun system. And so, two things happened in late Old English. One is that speakers gradually started adopting a “th” pronoun from Old Norse, which gives us our modern “they,” “their,” and “them.” They adopted “she,” whose origins are kind of vague, but which seemed to have started in the South of England and move North.
Daniel: I going to say something about “she” that I noticed that was really weird, and that it didn’t get adopted everywhere. It was possible in the 1950s to find people saying– Did I get this from you?
Dennis: Maybe.
Daniel: Saying is who married or is her married? The she just wasn’t everywhere.
Dennis: There’s a lot of variation, and certainly in pronouns and dialects in England. So, yeah, it’s never been 100% adopted. And so even the T-H forms, we have the campaign slogan of Harry S. Truman, when he ran for president of the US. One of his slogans was ” Give ’em hell, Harry!”
Daniel: That’s right.
Dennis: Because he was supposed to be a plain speaker. The ’em which we often spell when we write it ’em is really a reflex from that old H plural.
Daniel: Yeah, okay.
Dennis: There’s no phonological reason why the T-H would disappear suddenly.
Daniel: So, this has been going on for a really long time. English speakers have been using “they” for one person. There are countless examples from Chaucer and Austen and Twain, and Shakespeare. But then, as you mentioned in the book, people started suddenly taking exception to it in the 1800s. Am I right?
Dennis: Yeah. In the later 1700s and in the 1800s, when you started getting a usage and grammar tradition and going, “Here are the rules, here’s what you ought to do.”
Daniel: And that was happening at the same time as a lot of people were gaining wealth from the Industrial Revolutions so that–
Dennis: Yeah, the bourgeois [unintelligible [00:20:23] kind of. Everybody wants to have the appearance of being cultured and being a good proper speaker and writer of English, so the rule books were popular. When rule books get popular, there’s a demand for– the rule book writers have to have some content, they have to have something to say. So, they made up a lot of stuff.
Daniel: A lot of Latin stuff.
Dennis: A lot of Latin stuff, a lot of stuff that they just pulled out of thin air, or, wherever you pull stuff out of when you’re making it up. I mean, that which rule, Henry Fowler made that up.
Daniel: Really?
Dennis: Yeah, he said, English has a lot of variation between that and which wouldn’t be nice if we regularize it. And we had that for non-restrictive clauses in which for restrictive clauses. And other people read that and said, “Oh, that’s a law, that’s in stone, that’s Fowler’s Commandment number,” whatever. And it became an editorial rule that people followed.
Daniel: So, by going back to singular “they” were really just putting it– we’re just kicking it old school, we’re just putting it back the way it was.
Dennis: Absolutely. We’re saying, “You guys made up these rules about how they have a pronoun, that seems to be plural can’t also be singular. But wait a minute, look at all the other pronouns, all the other personal pronouns. Do that.” We are not amused. The monarch says, “We are not amused.” There’s only one person speaking. But that royal “we” is pronoun being used as a singular. And then of course, there’s “you.”
Daniel: Yes, I first noticed this when you put out your poem on Twitter.
Dennis: Oh, yes.
Daniel: “Roses are red, Violets are blue, singular THEY is older than singular you. I thought that was great.
Dennis: Yeah, thank you. That came to me in a vision.
Daniel: [chuckles] Very nice. At first, when people started using “you” for one person, some people just hated it. What was going on there?
Dennis: Absolutely. It was started in the 17th century. The older singular forms of the second person going back to old English, all began with the T-H spelling, T-H sound. Thou, thee and thy, and thine, and thou arch, “Get thee to a nunnery,” hamlet tells Ophelia, “Thy kingdom come.” Those sorts of things. Those T-H pronouns were singular. And “you” was pretty much universally plural, although it occasionally was used for a singular when you were being deferential to some important person. But in the 17th century, “you” started becoming singular, all over the place, not just in differential use, but just an ordinary, any second person. And people say that, just like they would say about singular THEY later on. “That’s wrong, that’s ungrammatically, you can’t do that.” And George Fox, who founded the Society of Friends, the Quakers, wrote an entire book condemning singular “you” and said, “Anybody who uses singular “you,” is unlettered, an idiot and a fool.” And you saw how much influence that was. It didn’t stop singular “you.” I mean, the Quakers kept using it into the 19th century. And interestingly enough, grammar books preserve singular “you” in the paradigm.
Daniel: How long for?
Dennis: Till the middle to later 19th century, you still saw students being tested. Thou, thee, and thy, singular, “you” plural. And even when nobody said it, nobody wrote it, unless they were like imitating old fashioned biblical or Shakespearean language or trying to write a poem like Shelley “Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert.” But this is old fashioned, old-timey language. And yet the grammar books were lagging way behind usage. And it wasn’t until the later 19th century that you started seeing a shift. There were a couple of earlier grammarians who acknowledged, singular “you,” most grammar books insisted on, thou, thee and thy, this is just so archaic.
Daniel: Well, the thing I love about this is the people who insisted on that, just sound nuts today. And–
Dennis: Absolutely.
Daniel: I have a feeling when somebody insists, “No, no, no, they is always plural.” They’re going to sound nuts like that, too.
Dennis: Eventually, yeah.
Daniel: Eventually.
Dennis: Not to mention the competition, but I was on a podcast last week. And the host, we got onto the singular THEY thing and the host said, “You know, I think anybody who’s pronoun is they, I’m going to refer to them as they because I’m a nice guy, and I want to do what they want,” but it’s wrong. It’s grammatically incorrect. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t listen.
Daniel: Well, good on him anyway, I guess.
Dennis: Yeah. Okay, so he can separate his grammar rule from the requirements of polite conversation, which is, if you want to get on with your audience, you use language that they will find acceptable.
Daniel: One of the things that I love about your book, What’s Your Pronoun?: is the section where you just have a big, long chronology of all of the invented pronouns or all of the progress. Every time this issue has come up in the last few hundred years, and I was extremely surprised to find that invented pronouns are not just the 60s or 70s thing in the 1960s or 1970s. But it goes back just hundreds of years that surprised me beyond measure.
Dennis: This is what I think is the important contribution that I can make is to provide this history which I discovered that it goes back in terms of discussing the need for pronoun goes back at least to the 1780s.
Daniel: Wow.
Dennis: And coining pronouns, the earliest one I found was 1841. People discuss the need for 50, 60, 70 years before that, and some of them suggested, “Well, let’s take one of these dialect pronouns. Let’s borrow word from another language. Let’s repurpose an English word.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I think, he wanted to use whose instead of he or she, instead of the generic, he. John Stuart Mill in 1850 said, “We need a pronoun.” He didn’t come up with a solution, but he noted the absence of it. But anyway, in 1841, this guy who was a doctor had just gotten his MD from Yale. And apparently, medicine was not really doing it for him because the next year in 1841, he wrote a grammar book, not a popular grammar book. I believe, there’s only one copy in any library in the world, and that’s at Yale. And I think it’s at Yale because he sent them a copy. And in it, he creates this pronoun, E, just the capital letter E. And the possessive is E-S-S, and the object form is M-E-M. And he calls this the Masculo-Feminine. He does not explain it. He doesn’t say where he got it from. It’s just he’s got this little paradigm of pronouns. And he, she and it are singular, E, S, and M are plural. That’s it.
Daniel: Which is kind of what we say anyway, sometimes.
Dennis: Yeah.
Daniel: I’m noticing T-H-O-N. Thon.
Dennis: Yes, thon.
Daniel: What about that one?
Dennis: So that was announced to the world in 1884, by Charles Crozat Converse, who was a well-known composer. He was a hymn writer, he wrote What a Friend We Have in Jesus.
Daniel: Oh.
Dennis: And many other popular Protestant hymns.
Daniel: I know that one.
Dennis: Yeah. In 1884, he published a letter to the editor in a literary magazine and said, “Hey, guys, I came up with this pronoun thon,” it’s common gender, which is how they used to call words that refer to either males or females who would use gender neutral. Now, the idea of non-binary was really not part of the discussion that early on. And he said, “It would be efficient when we don’t know the gender of somebody we’re talking about, or when we would want to include both a man and a woman or when we want to hide the gender. It’s very modern, it’s economical, it’s going to save printing costs and all this stuff.” Apparently, he coined it as early as 1858, but he didn’t announce it till 1884. And it was included in Webster’s New International Dictionary: Second Edition.
So. what thon did and he told us how to pronounce it. It’s the “T-H” that, what we call the– [crosstalk]
Daniel: Oh, that one.
Dennis: Yeah, that plus one.
Daniel: Hmm.
Dennis: It sparked a national discussion. And people started using it. Not a lot of people, but some people. And it was included in the dictionary. As recently as the 1970s, there were a few voices reminding us about thon. Nobody was really listening, not too many people were using it by then. But there were letters to the New York Times, for example, in the 1970s, reminding us because it was a period when sex neutral language was becoming popular, reminding us that we already had a perfectly good gender-neutral pronoun.
Daniel: I was wondering if you had a favorite coin pronoun?
Dennis: I do. And I will try to say it without popping the mic. My favorite coin pronoun is ip, I-P.
Daniel: Ip.
Dennis: Ip coined in 1884 by Emma Carleton in response to Crozat Converse’s thon. She didn’t like thon, and so the number of people who didn’t like thon proposed alternative. So, she proposed ip and the possessive ip’s. And I think it gets the award for cutest pronoun.
Daniel: It’s pretty cute.
Dennis: I don’t think it has ever gotten the attention it deserves, and so I would like to. I put in a plug for it every time I can.
Daniel: Okay, why ip? How did that– I’m trying to figure that one out.
Dennis: “Pronouns are little words,” she said. And it’s a little word. It looks Latin, but it isn’t.
Daniel: Oh, ipse.
Dennis: I guess looking Latin is attractive, but it wouldn’t attract the critics who said it’s not real Latin because it’s pretend Latin. So, it’s an error[?]. [00:32:12]
Daniel: But there is the Latin ipse, which is the reflexive itself.
Dennis: Ipse. Yes. Probably what got her thinking about ip.
Daniel: Yeah. [crosstalk]
Dennis: Ipso facto, ipse dixit.
Daniel: That’s the one I learned in Latin school.
Dennis: Yeah.
Daniel: These invented words, these coined pronouns have never really caught on. I guess, it’s just because pronouns are more or less a closed class in English. And you can invent all of the nouns and verbs you want. But it’s really hard to invent, what’s really hard to invent any word, but pronouns, I think, would maybe it’s not so hard.
Dennis: They change more slowly, but it’s not entirely closed. Going back to the second person again, when “you” become singular, one of the things that happens is it creates the potential for ambiguity. Are you talking to me? Are you talking to us? And so, we disambiguate, we work our way around it, especially in the spoken language, by using forms like ‘y’all’ or ‘youse’.
Daniel: That’s true.
Dennis: Or [unintelligible [00:33:23] which is form you find in the American Midwest, or, more recently, “you guys” has become the kind of non-geographically marked plural, even though it is potentially marked plus masculine. And “you guys” catches on during a period when the rest of the language is becoming more and more gender neutral. So that’s an interesting phenomenon.
Daniel: Yeah, it is.
Dennis: And then even “y’all” in the American south becomes ambiguous because people start using it for one person, and so to disambiguate you, you see, all y’all to clarify.
Daniel: That’s right.
Dennis: All y’all, all you people.
Daniel: What was the thing that surprised you the most when you were working on the book?
Dennis: The thing that surprised me most was the legalistic discussions over he, whether it included or didn’t include she in statutes in the 19th century, and how women’s rights advocates tried to flip it. So that if he is gender neutral, after all, this improves their situation. And I had no idea this had happened till I came upon it in looking up stuff for this book, and I just love that. It is the essence of the politics of pronouns right there because it played out in a political field in a legalistic field. And it’s still sort of playing out because what you see now, at least in the US, a number of states have rewritten their constitutions to make them gender neutral.
One of the things that you see when they do this, California did this, Minnesota, a couple of other states is a move away from any pronouns at all. So, instead of saying the governor, he or the governor, he or she, or the governor, they, you just repeat the governor. “The governor will be elected for a term of four years,” the governor this, the governor that. Just keep repeating it, stylistically we would find if we were writing a novel or an essay, that’s an awkward kind of repetition. But for legal text, when clarity is important, they sacrifice the colloquial sense of language to make sure that’s very specific.
Daniel: We’re talking to Dennis Baron of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign about his book, What’s Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She. It’s out now from Liveright W. W. Norton, anywhere you get your books. Dennis, thanks so much for coming on Talk to Talk with me today.
Dennis: Thank you, Daniel.
Daniel: We got to take a track, so let’s listen to Tiana Khasi with They Call Me on RTRFM 92.1. Can you stick around for Word of the Week?
Dennis: Okay.
Daniel: All right. Welcome back to Talk the Talk RTRFM’s weekly show about linguistics, the science of language. We are talking to Dennis Baron, author of What’s Your Pronoun? Thanks for coming back.
Dennis: Thanks for having me, again.
Daniel: We are talking about Words of the Week, the words that got our interest. What was one of yours, if you don’t mind me asking?
Dennis: Well, I’ll tell you. The word that struck because I just discovered it yesterday. And then it’s hard to not think about anything else. And it’s been hard for me not to think about anything except pronouns for the last couple of weeks, because I’ve been doing pronouns, I’ve been talking pronouns.
In 1974, this guy named Warren Farrell, who was a male feminist in the 1970s, he is actually a board member of the National Organization of Women apparently, he started the modern men’s liberation movement as well and became– I don’t know very much about him. I haven’t had time to look too much about him up, but apparently, he’s become a little more conservative in his old age, he is my age. Anyway, he coined in his book called The Liberated Man, a set of gender-neutral pronouns, te, tes, for the possessive his or her, and tey or ter, to[?] [00:38:03] spell the T-I-R, but it rhymes with her, according to him. And he used them sporadically in this book that he wrote in 1974. So that’s my Word of the Week. Te, Tes and Ter.
Daniel: Wow. So that one, it was discovered so recently that you didn’t have time to put it in the book, and you’re busting it out here for the first time.
Dennis: You heard it here first, folks.
Daniel: Wow. So, in 1974, te included this in te’s book.
Dennis: Yeah. But apparently, he didn’t use it throughout the book. Nobody’s consistent. And maybe Mr. Farrell is guilty of inconsistency, or maybe his editors took over and he didn’t notice.
Daniel: Thanks for that. That’s fantastic. Let’s see, there was one word that caught my attention this week. And it is the flinging thing like a catapult. As a kind of catapult. It’s got a weight on it. It can launch a 90-kilogram projectile 300 meters, it seems.
Dennis: Mm-hmm. Like cows.
Daniel: How do you say it?
Dennis: Like cows in a Monty Python movie.
Daniel: Yes, you might[?]. [00:39:18]
[laughter]
Dennis: I call it a catapult, I know it’s–.
Daniel: Argh.
Dennis: I forget what the pronunciation supposed to be Trehbyoushay, Trebuchet, Trehbyoshet.
Daniel: The first one that you said was how I say it: Trehbyoushay.
Dennis: Yeah. But the English take a word from French, and you don’t know.
Daniel: Well, here’s the thing. Jonathon Owen @ArrantPedantry has noticed this one. He looked in a bunch of dictionaries and pointed out that didn’t– for example, Merriam Webster, it’s Trehbyoshet.
Dennis: Trehbyoshet.
Daniel: Not a Trehbyoushay, but a Trehbyoshet. So, T on the end, stress on the last syllable.
Dennis: Right.
Daniel: It also has other pronunciation like Trebuchet, Trebucket.
Dennis: Okay.
Daniel: This blows my mind.
Dennis: Yes. When are you ever going to see that word again? I mean, it’s not going to be the Word of the Week next week. [laughs]
Daniel: Yeah, but there’s whole Reddit subgroups devoted to this. There are Trebuchet memes, and I’m pretty sure that nobody says it that way.
Dennis: Okay.
Daniel: I thought that was, it’s like–
Dennis: I haven’t seen that word in years. I had to look up what it meant.
Daniel: Yes.
Dennis: Yes, [crosstalk]. I don’t know.
Daniel: Apparently–
Dennis: All I can think of is, the cow being catapulted over the ramparts in Monty Python.
Daniel: Well, it looks like James Harbeck of Sesquiotica is on the case, there’s a link on our blog talkthetalkpodcast.com. Looks like the word came to us from 12th century French when they did actually say the T in French. And French changed and English changed along with it, but that-
Dennis: I believe it.
Daniel: -pronunciation is stuck in dictionaries. So, it reminds me of what happened with pubes a few years ago. I don’t know if you were there for the pube saga.
Dennis: I was not.
Daniel: Merriam-Webster had only one pronunciation for pu-bes or maybe pyü-bēz. And so, people successfully lobbied Merriam Webster [Dennis chuckles] to add this new pronunciation.
Dennis: Right.
Daniel: It looks like looks like the Merriam-Webster folks are aware of the movement to try to change or to add this pronunciation and update it. As of today, it hasn’t happened but I expect pretty soon they’ll be adding that in.
Dennis: Okay, well.
Daniel: Hotdog. [Dennis chuckles] And it makes me wonder what other fossilized pronunciations are lurking around in dictionaries. I have no idea. What else is there?
Dennis: Oh, there’s got to be a ton of things. We have, what, have for 475,000 words in the OED, maybe more to check each one and update it. It’s a monumental, and ongoing task because meanings change, senses change. While the OED and Merriam-Webster both introduced recently the non-binary sense of singular THEY. They had the indefinite sense of singular THEY, already established but that’s what they added to it, the non-binary use of it. It happens that you change the meaning, new meanings arise, old meanings fall away and you catch up.
Daniel: It’s good that we update.
Dennis: We do.
Daniel: Our Words of the Week Te and Trebuchet or Trehbyoushay, however you want to say it. Even if you say Trebuckey, that might be a bridge too far.
Dennis: And then, don’t forget the swearing, don’t color. You see that on ads in late-night TV.
Daniel: Our Words of the Week. Once again the book is What’s Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She available everywhere you get your books. Professor Dennis Baron, thanks so much for coming on the show today. It’s been a real fun talking.
Dennis: Great to be here, Daniel.
Daniel: Let’s take a track, and this one is Throwing Snow with their track Simmer on RTRFM 92.1.
Sanath on Facebook says hi. Okay, here it goes. “So, you know how singular THEY is a thing, right? But when we talk about someone who goes by they and the third person, why do we still use plural verbs as in, does he like ice cream? Versus, do they like ice cream? He regardless of what they refers to one person or many, people still say do, I’ve never heard, does they like ice cream? My question is how do we classify they as a pronoun when it takes the same verb regardless of plurality? Do you think we’ll eventually start making some kind of distinction in the verbs we use for singular versus plural they? Thanks. P.S. I’ve been listening to the podcast for a few years now, and you folks are absolutely awesome.” Aw, thanks a lot.
Well, let’s see. Makes sense to me that we would talk about THEY for one person, but still say do they like ice cream? Because this isn’t just about the semantics of singularity versus plurality. This is also about something called Subject-Verb Agreement. I do, you do, they do, he she or it does.
What we’re doing here is we’re expanding the semantics of THEY while retaining its syntactic demands. And this is totally normal, because semantics is the squashy thing. Semantics is the thing that gives when syntax and semantics bump up against each other. Syntax seems to be locked down a little more. It can move, of course, but it’s a little trickier. I would not expect this to change because people have been using, remember, singular THEY for 800 to 1000 years and this hasn’t resulted in that kind of grammatical change ever. So why would it now? Thanks, Sanath.
Russell asks, “Listening to your podcast on Push and Pull.” That was one where we’re talking about words that you have to think about them before you can say them for just a second. “I remembered that I also have trouble,” says Russell, “quickly distinguishing between EAST and WEST.” Yes, yes. “This occasionally leads to interesting conversations with air traffic controllers as I’m using my private pilot license.” Okay, wow. Well, Russell, yes, I can understand that. Totally. A bit of panic in the tower, I’m sure. Thanks for that. Philip says, “Hey, guys, having just listened to the Push Pull episode on podcast, and I have a couple of comments I wanted to put forward. In distinguishing latitude and longitude, the longitude lines look like the segments of an orange, longitude segment and orange all have a G in them.” How about that? That’s pretty good.
Also, mirrors, I think I said something about mirrors reversing left or right, but not up and down. Phillips says, “Mirrors don’t reverse left to right. And you correctly said they don’t reverse up and down. They actually reverse front to back. Your brain struggles with this. And the easiest interpretation is a left to right reversal.” I just had to get my head around this, so I checked out an article on Wired, that’ll be on our blog, Talk to Talk podcast. So, imagine that you’re facing a mirror, and now you’re looking at yourself on the other side, our brain thinks that we have walked around the glass and we see ourselves. So, we imagine that we have switched left to right. We haven’t actually, because your right hand is still up against your right hand. Whereas it wouldn’t be that way if you’d walked around the back. If you climbed over, like a spider, and climbed over the glass, now you would be head down on the other side. And then we would going, “Hmm. How come mirrors reverse top to bottom but not left to right?” So, this is sort of a cultural understanding and kind of a hack that our brain does. But in fact, mirrors don’t reverse left to right, they reverse front to back. How about that? Phillip says, “Anyway, great show, and I always arrive at work slightly more educated, informed and amused than when I left home.” That’s what we’re shooting for, Philip.
Jonathan says, “Hi, Talk the Talk/Daniel. I was listening to the podcast yesterday about the certain words you have to take an extra second to get right and was rejoiced to discover that I’m not the only one with this difficulty. For me, it is particularly when typing or writing in order to try and discover these words were so hard to retrieve, paste and paste to the pace that you stick something with and the pace that you have here and hear the different sorts of homonyms.”
Jonathan says, “After a quick google search, I discovered that people with some types of aphasia seem to have difficulty retrieving homonyms and homophones, google ‘homophone aphasia.’ Now I don’t have any sort of brain injury, but I find myself struggling to retrieve the right word when typing quickly. What bugs me is, it’s not through lack of intelligence. I know the difference between the words and some of my peers aren’t even in the same lexical categories. But when I’m sort of typing on autopilot, I end up making these mistakes. So, I definitely take solace in the fact that I’m not the only one looking forward to the next podcast. Jonathan.”
Yeah, that’s right. I think we’re dealing with two different things here. I think homophone aphasia, having to take a minute because they sound the same. That’s one thing, and I definitely don’t have that at all. But I do have the one where semantically, they’re related. So, there’s two things going on, phonology and semantics, and maybe even a little bit of orthography going in, because I have a hard time, like I say, with push and pull and swing and slide. So, hmm, tricky stuff. Thanks, Jonathan. Really appreciate that.
You are going to want to stick around because Mark O’Neill is going to be taking us out to lunch, he has spent the week digging through bins, listening to lots and lots of Myspace and finding the greatest tunes that could be found. Not just that exists, but they could possibly exist. I just like to give a shout out to Adie, Carolin, Chris, Lyssa, Kate and Termy, also to Bob Kristofer, Matt, Andrew, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Helen, Binh, Jack, Nigel, Damien, Dustin, Larry, Michael, Whitney, and Gilles. We’ll have another episode for you next week. Thanks for listening. Till next time, keep talking.
Ben: Talk the Talk is an RTRFM podcast. RTRFM is an independent community radio station that relies on listeners for support, you can become a subscriber at rtrfm.com.au/subscribe.
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