Pronoun

Towards more picturesque speech™ →Go uptown SEC guidance on plain EnglishIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Plain English Drafting Metaphor Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Lawyers don’t like pronouns because they (pronouns, that is, not lawyers) tend to be short and idiomatic.

This unnecessarily lowers the bar. Much better is repeated use of the nouns to which they (the pronouns, not the nouns) might, if they were used, relate.

The use, or not, of pronouns doesn’t change the semantic content much less the legal freighting, but their eschewal makes any text just that little bit less penetrable to those without a direct financial incentive in the job of reading it.

The official excuse has something to do with imprecision: “you” and “it” can ambiguously refer to the subject or object of a sentence: unlike those ultra-precise Germans, we Englanders only half-heartedly decline our pronouns. For all that, the English language — complete with pronouns — works unambiguously well in most other linguistic contexts. Besides, lawyers have their own special form of pronoun: the definition.

Pronouns and gender

Fools rush in where libtards fear to tread. — Alexander Pope

Much ink and no small amount of bile has been spilled on the question of gender inclusivity in language. Some of it, we cautiously venture, speaks to a bit of softness when it comes to grammar from those who study grievances.

There is a fashion towards signposting one’s preferred personal pronoun wherever the opportunity arises: business cards, email signoffs, LinkedIn profiles and so on. So, “Otto Büchstein (They/Them)”, for example.

Now the JC has no quarrel with how anyone wants to identify a gender — variety being the spice of life, the more exotic concoctions we can between us decide the better — though one does risk tripping over the inevitable conclusion that lies at the end of that road that — there should be no genders; we are all different, all individuals and the very idea of declining nouns in the first place was a ghastly mistake.But that aside, there are still a few puzzling aspects about this behaviour.

Firstly there is that slash; that virgule. As with “and/or”, “(she/her)” is an ungainly construction, and it speaks to a certain fussiness unrelated to the gender designation. Why include nominative and accusative? Are there some people for whom gender differs depending on their position in a sentence? Can one be a he when a doer, and a she when a done to? This strikes me as rather fraught if the idea is to neuter power structures implicit in language. And if so, why leave out the possessive? Shouldn’t it be “(she/her/hers)”? And actually why not allow for flexibility with datives, genitives and ablatives? “(she/her/her/her/her/hers)”

Second, for the great majority of the population —the whole “cis-normal” part, at least — there’s already a way of unfussily designating your gender: your title: Mr., Mrs., Ms., Miss, and Master.

Of this great mass of hetero-normativity, only academics and medics have a quandary. Even they could fix it, if they really cared about it, by adding a gender title to to their honorific, the same way judges do: Mr. Doctor Jung; Mrs. Doctor Freud, and so forth.

Third, this pronoun angst appears directed at third person singular pronouns. The other five buckets are fine. Yet, when addressing someone directly, one does not use third person, except ironically, or to distance oneself from a tendentious but firmly-held opinion, as the JC often does. But this is the one we invariably use interpersonal communication. Wherever you may be on the gender spectrum, you are politely, unoppressively, uncontroversially, incontrovertibly, you. I dare say this is how language evolved, precisely because of the difficulties one would otherwise have making polite conversation with unfamiliar individuals of an apparently, but not definitively, feminine or masculine bearing.

So, the “(he/him)” designation appears to stipulate how a reader should gender a person when communicating about that person with someone else. I am going to get in trouble for saying this, readers, but that strikes me as rather bossy. Who am I to tell you how to moderate the language you use with someone else? And aren’t your choices of pronoun the least of my concern?

The JC dreads to think what people say about (he/him) behind (he/his) back: if the worst they do is to misgender (he/him) then all is well in the world, frankly.

See also

• Chauvinist language