OK, Frank Stachyra, I’ll bite. Your Viewpoints piece, headlined “Probing pronouns,” in the May 7 Wednesday Journal, is one way of looking at supposedly changing uses of the pronoun “they,” and I’ll assume you have similar feelings about “them” and “their.”
Your issue has to do with how the use of these pronouns in a story about the man who was recently electrocuted at a CTA station made the referents of the pronouns unclear. I remember noticing this when I read the article, and I recall having to backtrack a bit to make sure I could match each “they” to its referent. It added a few seconds to the time it took to digest the story, but given our ever-shrinking newspapers these days, I didn’t mind.
But it did make me think about our current English pronoun controversies.
My take on Frank’s issue is a bit different, though I don’t disagree with him. It seems to me that writers (and speakers) are having some trouble these days with all three of the th- pronouns, and with good reason — which Frank acknowledges by speculating that “virtue signaling” may have been at work. The gender-identity movement — which prompts some to announce their preferred pronouns (he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/their) — has highlighted English’s third-person pronouns, which already have a pretty colorful history.
Our singular third-person pronouns come to us directly from Anglo-Saxon (aka Old English), but that language had different third-person plural pronouns: there was a set of dual pronouns that died out, and the non-dual plural pronouns were hie/hem/heora. Our th- pronouns actually entered English via the Vikings’ Old Norse, and gradually replaced the Anglo-Saxon versions — perhaps because they were more easily distinguishable from the singular pronouns, which almost all also began with the /h/ sound.
But very early in the history of English, third-person plural pronouns were used for indefinite singular referents, a usage that continues today in utterances such as “If anyone wants to go, they should be here by 5:00.” Shakespeare used th- pronouns that way consistently. Grammar mavens took umbrage with this usage beginning in the late 18th century, but have been unable to curtail it. Many still insist it is ungrammatical.
The gender-identity movement has added a fresh wrinkle. Some people do not see themselves as masculine or feminine, but rather as non-binary, and ironically they have only two existing options for their third-person pronouns — th- pronouns, or “it.” Given the non-human implication of “it,” the choice of the th-forms was inevitable.
So today we have they/them/their used for indefinite referents, for non-binary referents, and now, I would argue, for referents where gender is irrelevant, as in the Journal article. I don’t know why the writer or editor made the choices that they made, but it is likely that they were at least uncertain about which pronouns to use. The gender of the person who died was masculine and was at least initially acknowledged with masculine pronouns — but the gender of the CTA attendant was irrelevant. The use of th- pronouns late in the article for both the victim and the attendant was confusing, but I’d still cut some slack. It’s a confusing era for those of us who use pronouns.
Which brings up a final observation about our current “Pronoun Wars,” in which some are triggered by people announcing their preferred pronouns. The signature files at the bottom of emails that say “My pronouns are x/y/z” always give only the third-person pronouns people wish to be used to refer to them because in English gender occurs only in third-person forms — not first- or second-person, which are the only forms anyone would ever use toward any person in a face-to-face conversation: I/me/mine, we/us/our, you/you/your.
So what someone announcing their pronouns is actually doing is telling us how to refer to them when they are not present — when they cannot hear us or read our words. I can see how some might view that as an unnecessarily burdensome demand. Our pronoun system is gracefully gender-neutral in the first- and second-person, so societal changes like this have minimal impacts on the pronouns we use in our in-person conversations. But pushing us to remember the choices of third-person pronouns people wish to be used to refer to them in their absence is no small ask.
It’s a fair ask in my opinion. But it’s not small. A little slack might be in order here, too.
Greg Pulliam is a retired professor of linguistics, communication and rhetoric at Illinois Tech, and a 32-year Oak Park resident.