Pronoun
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Towards more picturesque speech™
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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.<ref>The problem with atomising identity groups, to avoid those at the margins being categorised in a way that doesn't suit them, is that margins are a property of any group, however small, until it numbers one. Thus, identity politics will tend to fray at the edges.</>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 dative genitives and ablatives? “(she/her/her/her/her/hers)”
Second, for the great majority of the population - the whole “cis-normal” part (barring academics and medics), there’s already a way of unfussily designating your gender: your title: Mr., Mrs., Ms., Miss, and Master.
Only Doctors have a quandary. They could fix it, if they really cared about it, by adding a title too, the same way judges do: Mr Dr Jones; Mrs Doctor Freud, and so forth.
Third, this pronoun angst appears directed only third person pronouns. Yet, when addressing someone, one does not use third person, except ironically, or to distance oneself from a tendentious but firmly-held opinion, as the JC often does. The second person pronoun, “you” — for the Americans, “y’all” — is perfectly gender inclusive already.<>Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby made this point well in her show Douglas.<> 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 the subject when communicating with someone else. I am going to get in trouble for saying this, readers, but that strikes me as rather bossy. On the other hand, 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.