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 in the command of 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 their own gender — variety being the spice of life, the more concoctions we have between us the better — though one does risk tripping over the conclusion that lies down that road, if you go far enough along it, 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.[1] But with even 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 one’s wish to be clear about one’s gender. Why include nominative and accusative? Are there some 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? If the goal is to (er) neuter the power structures implicit in our language, that seems a rather odd way of going about it. And if that is the idea, why stop at subject and object? What about the possessive? Shouldn’t it be “(she/her/hers)”? And, actually, why not include 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 cared to, by adding a gendered title to to their honorific, the same way judges do: Mr. Doctor Jung; Mrs. Doctor Freud, and so forth.
Third, this pronoun angst is directed at third person singular pronouns. The other five buckets are fine as they are. Yet, when we address someone directly, we do not use the third person, except to distance ourselves from our own tendentious but firmly-held opinions, as the JC often does.[2]
The second person pronoun, “you” for most of the English speaking world, — “y’all” for the Americans — is perfectly gender inclusive already.[3] But this is the one we already use interpersonal communication. Wherever you may be on the gender spectrum, you are politely, unoppressively, uncontroversially, incontrovertibly, you. I dare say language evolved like this 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? Not to say a little delusional: aren’t your choices of the pronoun you use when you talk about me the least of my concerns?
The JC dreads to think what people say about (he/him) behind (he/his) back: if the worst they do is to mis-gender (he/him) then all is well in the world, frankly.
See also
References
- ↑ 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, any philosophy that emphasises marginalised identities will tend to fray at the edges.
- ↑ Though this is to switch first for third person, not second. The first person does not need to lecture the world how he should refer to himself in the third person.
- ↑ Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby made this point well in her show Douglas.