Epicene Third Person Singular Pronouns a guest post by Rio J. Picollo

Posted on June 24, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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Epicene Third Person Singular Pronouns by Rio J. Picollo

Rio Picollo is an English major at Southern Oregon University. She enjoys reading, juggling, and worrying about future career prospects.

Over the last few decades, a reform movement has been underway with the purpose of standardizing a gender-neutral pronoun. The English language’s most common and largely uncontested third person singular pronouns – he, she, and it– denote the gender of the individual in question. This can be problematic when a singular pronoun is is intended to refer to either sex.

Grammatical gender is one of the most basic components of many languages. Nouns can be classified as masculine, feminine, or neuter with corresponding inflections (though some languages, such as French, have only masculine and feminine classifications). Words are categorized arbitrarily rather than by biological sex (Wheeler 531). For example, the French word vagin meaning “vagina” is a masculine noun even though a person who has one is likely to be female. Old English had a functioning system of grammatical gender, but the practice died out during the Middle English period. The few remnants of grammatical gender in Modern English are based largely on biological sex.

Words like blonde/blond and brunette/brunet have maintained a questionable status as grammatically gendered, but by-and-large, gender is reflected only in pronouns (Wheeler 528). The continuing debate over epicene pronouns is, in part, a quest for social justice. Grammatical gender influences cultural perceptions of biological sex, which in turn affects an individual’s perception of the world (Perniss 227); therefore, grammatical gender may allow gender bias to permeate through our cultural consciousness. The feminist and queer rights movements have sought to reform language in order to reflect our society’s commitment to eliminating discrimination based on sex (Berube 170).

They are small changes overall, but may have a marked impact on the cognitive processes of future generations. Many occupational titles that once used a compound ending in -man (such as fireman) or a feminine suffix like -ess (stewardess) have been replaced with gender-inclusive terms (firefighter and flight attendant) in order to reflect the acceptance of women in the workplace, and many writers favour the term hero as a gender-neutral alternative to the feminine heroine to avoid differentiating between male and female bravery (Berube 170).

Though largely an issue of civil rights, the absence of an epicene singular pronoun also poses a practical issue to writers and grammarians. English lacks a universally-accepted pronoun that can refer to an antecedent whose gender is unknown. In such cases, it would be conjecture to suppose the gender of the referent, but there is no standardized pronoun to account for this problem. Various options exist, but none are considered perfectly suited for the task. Here is an overview of several of the options that are currently in use.

Generic he

English’s lack of epicene third-person pronouns prompted the acceptance of the gendered pronoun he as a generic referring to both males and females. It’s believed that the androcentric state of grammatical study was largely responsible for this Parliament proclaimed that the generic he a grammatically correct and gender-inclusive pronoun in 1850, though its usage as such dates back much farther (Berube 174). He was commonly used in legal practice and formal writing, including the King James Bible (Clason 23), but its popularity has waned in recent decades due to its sexist implications. Studies have shown that the use of he may reinforce gender bias (Fisk 481), which suggests that its use is incongruous with our modern sensibilities.

A generic she has been proposed as a way to combat the generic he. Rather than solve the issue, this merely inverts the inequality of power that he suggests; she is often used a generic specifically to draw attention to the issue of female subjugation throughout history. Some writers prefer to alternate between he and she in order to appear gender-neutral. This practice offers a balance between the two, but it could be said that this practice needlessly spotlights gender just as much as she (Berube 177-78).

Singular they

They is the oldest alternative to the masculine generic (Berube). Although it’s most commonly prescribed as a third-person plural pronoun, it’s widely accepted as a singular pronoun. Indeed, people have responded to the use of they as a gender-neutral singular pronoun more readily than any other (Jochnowitz 199). Its informality lends itself to common speech. Sentences like Someone forgot their keys sound natural and often goes unnoticed. The main drawback is that they, being a plural pronoun, doesn’t adhere to standard conventions regarding pronoun agreement. When used in conjunction with an indefinite pronoun that semantically implies plurality, such as someone, this disagreement is usually overlooked. But not as easily so when used in reference to a non-distinct singular antecedent. The American Heritage Usage Panel has found that sentences like A typical student will do their homework the night before it is due are seen as grammatically incorrect by an overwhelming majority (Berube). It can pose a problem for a writer by making them uncomfortable with using a pronoun that can easily be misconstrued as an error.

One

The use of one as a pronoun dates back to the thirteenth-century (“One”). As such, it has the benefit of being an established gender-indefinite pronoun, and is in concordance with prescriptive rules regarding pronoun-antecedent agreement, unlike the singular they (Carlton 157). However, one is perhaps most widely used to refer to a non-human object, as in Their dog died, but they’re planning to get a new one. This poses an issue of civil rights, as one may be seen as an objectifying pronoun when used with a specific human referent. Moreover, when used to describe human, one sounds overly formal and hypothetical, such as in the sentence One would do that if one were wise, which can easily be reworded to form a more concrete statement by switching to first- and second-person: I would do that if I were you. As a result, the use of one as a gender-neutral pronoun has never garnered much popularity in common speech (“One”).

He or she, she/he

Periphrastic constructions such as these are a more modern solution to the gendered pronoun controversy (Jochnowitz 200) . Originally proposed in the 1800s, the he or she construction was dismissed in favor of the generic he. In recent years, these sorts of forms have garnered more support. They allow the sentence maintain grammatical accuracy while encompassing both binary gender orientations. However, they can be clumsy when used repeatedly, as in Every employee must wash his/her hands before he/she begins his/her shift.Furthermore, there is no standard pronunciation for these backslash constructions; his/her may be pronounced “his or her”, “his-her”, or “his-slash-her” depending on the reader’s preference.

In regard to reader’s preference, the he/she she/he forms pose yet another issue, as they may be considered gender-biased. By necessity of its construction, one gender must come before the other, which implies one is superior to the other. Alternating between he/she and she/he forms can resolve this problem, but tends to exacerbate the confusion created by repeated use. Transgender or genderqueer individuals that don’t identify as either he or she may also take issue with these types of pronouns.

Invented Pronouns

Another modern epicene suggestion has been the adoption of an invented pronouns. Standardizing an entirely new pronoun set would effectively resolve the grammatical issue, as well as account for those individuals who don’t wish to identify with either of the gender-definite third-person singular pronouns. Many such pronoun sets have been proposed over the centuries, such as the Spivak (ey, em, eir, emself), Humanist (hu, hum, hus, humself), and a litany of others (Berube 174).

One of the most widely known of these invented pronouns is ze and its inflected forms zir, zirs, zirself (also hir, hirs, hirself) which arose during the 1970s. It is derived from the German pronoun Sie meaning both she and they (Williams “Modern Neologism”). Using this construction, a sentence such as He went to the pharmacy to get her prescription for her could be written to Ze went to the pharmacy to get zir prescription for zir.This may cause confusion as to which antecedent the pronouns refer, but the same confusion currently exists when two individuals signified by the same pronoun interact.

One of these neologisms could suffice as effective gender-neutral pronoun if it were to become standardized. However, none have garnered enough support to warrant its introduction into the canon. Most individuals are understandably resistant to the idea of adding an entirely new pronoun form into their working vocabulary. So far, reforms geared toward adopting one of these invented pronouns has been an exercise in futility.

It’s evident that none of these options are perfectly suited for the position of a standardized third-person singular pronoun for one reason or another. It is important to remember everyone has a different threshold for what constitutes sexist language, so catering to every audience is an impossible task. Choosing which pronoun to use is a matter of taste in most instances. If in doubt, it may be wisest to construct a sentence that eliminates the need for any of the above-mentioned options: A typical student completes his their ones his/her zir] homework the night before it is due. The sentence is grammatically correct and connotes the same meaning without the pronoun. In most cases, it’s possible to rewrite the material in a way that neutralizes the problem component.

This is a good way to avoid the issue, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. We’ve made great strides toward reforming sexist language, but there are still hurdles to jump. Opinions are divided over this particular issue, and likely will be for the foreseeable future. Currently, any of the options highlighted here are viable options with varying degrees of acceptance. One may use whichever third-person singular pronoun he/she prefers as long as zir consistent. To each their own.

Works Cited

Jochnowitz, George. “Everybody Likes Pizza, Doesn’t He or She?” American Speech 57 (Autumn 1982): 198-203. Print.

Berube, Margery S., et al. The American Heritage Book of English Usage. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. 170-85. Print.

Wheeler, Benj. Ide. “The Origin of Grammatical Gender.” Journal of Germanic Philoshophy 2 (1899): 528-45. Print.

“one.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, 2013. Web. 30 May 2013.

Fisk, William R. “Responses to ‘Neutral’ Pronoun Presentations and the Development of Sex-Biased Responding.” Developmental Psychology 21 (1985): 481-85. Print.

“Modern Neologisms.” Gender-Neutral Pronoun FAQ, John Williams: 2004. Web. 3 June 2013.

Clason, Marmy A. “Feminism, Generic ‘He’, and the TNIV Bible Translation Debate.” Critical Discourse Studies 3 (2006): 23-35. Print.

Perniss, Pamela, et al. “Speaking of shape: The Effects of Language-Specific Encoding on Semantic Representations.” Language & Cognition 4 (2012): 223-42. Print.

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Diane L. Goeres-Gardner on Inside Oregon State Hospital: A History of Tragedy and Triumph

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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Earlier this year, Literary Ashland interviewed Diane L. Goeres-Gardner. Her book
Inside Oregon State Hospital: A History of Tragedy and Triumph has recently been published by The History Press.

Diane Goeres-Gardner is a fifth-generation Oregonian, with roots in Tillamook County as early as 1852. She has a master’s degree from the University of Oregon where she studied with poet Ralph Salisbury. Her book Necktie Parties: A History of Legal Executions in Oregon, 1851-1905, was released by Caxton Press in 2005 and her Murder, Morality and Madness: Women Criminals in Early Oregon appeared in 2009, also by Caxton. Her book Images of America: Roseburg was published by Arcadia Press in 2010, part of its Images of America series, and for a history of the state hospital in images, see Goeres-Gardner’s Images of America: Oregon Asylum.

EB: How did you get interested in the Oregon State Hospital?

DG: While writing my second book, Murder, Morality and Madness: Women Criminals in Early Oregon I did some research into Oregon State Hospital (OSH) because before 1900 women prisoners were often sent to OSH in lieu of leaving them in isolation for so many years. The diagnosis female patients were assigned all seemed to revolve around the fact they were female, such as menopause, giving birth, and taking care of children, etc. I thought that was strange. My research also revealed that no one had ever written a history about the hospital. After that I was hooked.

EB: What was the research process like?

DG: The research was very sporadic and extremely difficult. The hospital itself had almost no archived information. Even the photos they had were mostly duplicates of photos held in other archives. I did find a file about the Calbreath family at the Oregon Historical Society, but they had almost nothing on the hospital either. That meant my main sources of information were the State Archives, the State Library, and the microfilm files at the University of Oregon, which stores copies of Oregon’s newspapers. When you look at the endnotes in the book, almost all are from those three sources.

EB: I want to ask about eugenics and sterilization. About 2,600 people were sterilized in Oregon between 1917 and 1983. Was Oregon typical in this? You mention some eugenics proponents like Bethenia Owens-Adair. What was her impact?

DG: Oregon’s enthusiastic adoption of Eugenics doctrine was not typical of other states. California sterilized over 20,000 victims and Oregon had the seventh highest number of victims (behind North Carolina, Virginia, Michigan, Georgia and Kansas). Many states didn’t sterilize anyone. Only Oregon targeted the gay community so harshly. Oregon’s use of sterilization was a “perfect storm” created by the kind of people elected to office during those years, a backlash against the gay community after a particularly well publicized expose in Portland, and the bias of the state’s institutional superintendents. Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair was a persistent and influential proponent. She wrote the original bills Oregon’s legislatures finally approved. She just wouldn’t let it go. She was also well acquainted with the Applegate family and their mental illness problems. I believe that knowledge biased her toward the Eugenics philosophy.

EB: It was interesting that several members of the Applegate family were patients? How did so many Applegates end up in the asylum?

DG: I wanted the book to be more than just a collection of facts and figures. I wanted readers to feel the context of how patients experienced the hospital. To accomplish that, I needed to find patients in the hospital that I could research. The Applegate family was easy to research and had an extraordinary number of family members admitted to the asylum over a rather short period of time. I discovered and reported on eight members of the family committed to the hospital. There were actually two more that I didn’t mention in the book. Today we know that some kinds of mental illness do run through families. In the late 1800s people also knew from experience that some families had more incidents of mental illness than others. However they had extremely limited ways of dealing with it. Sending the patient to the Oregon State Asylum was just about their only option. There may have been other families with just as many patients in the hospital, however their names were less identifiable and harder to research.

EB: Funding seems to have always been an issue, as well as county-state disputes over funding. What did you conclude about the impact of funding on care.

DG: It is very costly to care for thousands, or even hundreds, of sick people who have no insurance and no way to pay for their care. Over the years funding issues have tormented not only the hospital, but all state institutions. Oregon is in a particularly vulnerable situation because the state’s only income is through property taxes and those have been capped. Also other states make the patient’s home county pay a portion of the expenses. Oregon doesn’t.

EB: You mention a celebrated 1914 dispute where a wife claimed that her husband was having her committed to gain control of her assets. Was this common?

DG: It may not have been common in Oregon, but it was always suspected. For many years Oregon laws protected women by prohibiting their husbands from divorcing them while they were in the hospital. The law made it very easy to have a person declared insane and a husband had greater power in front of a judge than a wife.

EB: The hospital changed its name from the Oregon Insane Asylum to the Oregon State Hospital? Did that reflect a change in its mission?

DG: Superintendent L. L. Rowland proposed changing the name as early as 1895 but it wasn’t acted upon until 1913 when a number of things changed. That year Oregon opened the Eastern Oregon State Hospital and the state discarded the old trustee system of supervision and changed to the Board of Control system. A new psychiatric and medical building was opened on campus in 1912 creating a more modern attitude toward mental illness. The mission was changed from warehousing people to trying to actively treat and cure mental illness. Certainly the term hospital had a more hopeful connotation than asylum.

EB: One long-time superintendent, Dean Brooks, allowed the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest to be filmed at the hospital, and even had a role in the film. Was the filming controversial?

DG: Dr. Brooks supported the project and wanted patients to be involved in all aspect of the movie’s filming. He believed it was beneficial for patients to be engaged in activities outside the hospital environment and that the movie would bring increased attention to the hospital’s needs. He did not think the movie attacked mental facilities as much as the authoritarian structure that so often surrounded them.

EB: I was fascinated by the various treatments: moral therapy, hydrotherapy, insulin and electroshock therapy, lobotomies. How did treatment evolve?

DG: OSH adopted various treatments as they developed across the United States. Treatments for mental illness went from basic incarceration to active remedies rather quickly. Soldiers returning from WWI and WWII with psychological problems created a need for better treatment modalities and OSH, like other hospitals, was eager to try them out. The need created the interest, and the interest created the cures.

EB: Funding, maintenance and staffing have always been issues, it seems. With the recent renovation, is the OSH turning a corner?

DG: Today the overcrowding is gone and instead of sharing a room with several other people, patients now live in private rooms. Their safety is no longer compromised by inadequate and outdated facilities. Staff can now focus on treating the patients instead of keeping buckets filling with rainwater from overflowing all over the floors. Superintendent Greg Roberts has reduced required staff overtime making the employees happier and healthier. All these improvements make it easier to focus on the important thing – helping patients get well and returning them to their communities.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

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MY YEAR OF NEW WORDS, Part 10: PHONEMES

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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If you’ve ever played Scrabble or Boggle or Worded with Friends, you know there are some letters that you just can’t do much with because they don’t fit together well. This has to do with the sound shape of English and the traffic rules of English syllables. English words are not just a matter of putting letters or sounds in any old order. Syllables have onsets of two or three consonants(codas and nuclei too but we’ll stick with onsets for this example). English has sp, st, sk, sm, sn, sl, fl, fr, shr, thr, pr, tr, kr, br, dr, gr, pl, kl, bl, tl, spl, skl, spr, str, skr. But there’s no dl or tl (well, Tlingit—but that’s a borrowed name) or thn or fn or sb, sd, sg—it’s partly the phonetics of vocal cord vibration and the preference for a certain amount of dissimilarity in words. Our phonetic patterns have odd gaps too: there’s small, snail, sled but no srimp—before an r we have to use sh (and we prefer the shr combination so much that some of us use a sh in words like strength and strong).

So while there are all manner of possible misspellings and new words and phonetic combinations, new words can’t be so unEnglish that people just scratch their heads. That’s why there’s no lfat, chnutter, or thmelt in the non-words. Non-words have to wend that line between novel and unpronounceable. So we get non-words like fnast (the sound of nasal passages being cleared inward) which is based on an Old English word for sneeze). We don’t use the fn onset any more but it was once English (like, kn, gn, and hw). The word snlob, someone who is snobbish about being a slob, violates the traffic rules of English onsets a bit too much. It words as a visual joke but snl is too hard to say.
Sometimes, though, the sounds fit together perfectly. I was happy with glind (to simultaneously grind and glide), which brings those concepts together in a sexy way and also draws on the partial sound symbolism of the onset gl: glisten, glamor, gloss, gleam, glimmer, glint, glare, glitter, glaze, glitz, glory, glee and glow.

Sound structure also facilitates puns (simple wordplay creating a double meaning) and double entendre (the allusion to a disguised or absent second word and meaning). So the non-word cudgole, (to persuade someone to move along by displaying a nightstick but not actually using it) alludes to both cajole and cudgel and widle (to move with one’s widest part first) alludes to sidle but is much less slinky. Twalkers (people who walk and text at the same time and nearly run into others) plays with the funny onset tw (tweet, twit, twaddle, Twinkie) as well as the cblending of texter plus walker. And dystopia (any locale is which ritual insult is the preferred and usual means of interaction) blend dis- with –topia while alluding to dystopia.

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My Year of New words, Part 9: TYPOS

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Ed Battistella
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One of the types of word formation that doesn’t turn up much in textbooks—but which has been enormously helpful to be—is the typo. Typing quickly I notice odd combinations of letters that sometimes suggest new words. Typing malapropism, for example, I produced mammalproism, which could be the misidentification of species. Portland writer Bill Cameron tweeted about a typing growd for crown several times, which suggested growd: an angry gathering and one growing in size.

Typos are not the only type of word error, or even the most fun: spoonerisms rearrange parts of word shapes—creating dickle and nimed from nickel and dimed or (if only sound features are switched) skubetti from spaghetti. Spoonerisms are transpositions of sounds, a verbal slip named in honor of the Rev. William Spooner. Spooner was a professor and later the head of Oxford University’s New College (a position charmingly called warden rather than president), and he was known to say such things as Is it kisstomary to cuss the bride? (customary to kiss) and The Lord is a shoving leopard (a loving shepherd).
Malapropisms are the semantic equivalent of action slips—when you put the ice cream in the cabinet rather than the freezer. When you malaprop you select (or activate) the wrong word, substituting strawberry for library, or vacuum for hair drier. Malapropisms are in fact named for the character Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals (among other things, she refers to another character as the very pine-apple of politeness).

As a literary technique, malapropisms are used to portray characters whose verbal ambitions exceed their vocabulary. We find them in Much Ado about Nothing (where Constable Dogberry notes that Comparisons are odorous (Act 3, Scene V), in Norman Lear’s All in the Family (where Archie Bunker complains about people making suppository remarks about the government), and in the Sopranos (where Tony’s father complains in a flashback that his wife is an albacore around my neck). You can malaprop just part of a word of course: as in choirpractor or Smithstonian.

And if the malapropped word seems to fit the context, others may refer to it as a Freudian slip. So when someone says Tell me what I can do to make things difficult (instead of different) or Thank you for your hostility (instead of hospitality), those are Freudian Slips.

When the malapropisms makes sense in a folk etymological way, they are often called eggcorns. Thus we find the eggcorns: escape goat for scapegoat, physical year for fiscal year, soaping wet for soaking wet (and of course eggcorns for acorns). There is even a term for the mishearing of musical lyrics and poetic lines, as when we hear Lead on, oh King eternal! as Lead On, O Kinky Turtle. These are called mondegreens.

Writer Sylvia Wright coined the term after observing a child mishear lines from the The Bonny Earl of Murray. Hearing They hae slay the Earl of Murray/and laid him on the green, the child understood it as a double murder: They hae slay the Earl of Murray/And Lady Mondegreen. Young children and beginning writers are frequent sources of mondegreens and especially eggcorns, producing tales of an athlete who vouches never to lose again, wires sauntered together, tight-nit groups and coinsiding events.

Closed-caption fails are the errors made by the speech recognition software used on news programs. Exercising in front of a bank of televisions at the Ashland YMCA, I read that health care reform is holding on by a threat, and in a different story that there is no constellation for angry travelers stuck in Europe. I learn about tough times for folks who make yocks, the latest activities of the airline pirate’s union, and get a political update from the city of Your fault, Virginia. I can laugh at these guiltlessly. Closed-caption errors may not yet match the classic eloquence of Reverend Spooner and Mrs. Malaprop, but they are making progress and making me smile.

What all of the semantic errors have in common is our impetus to assign motivated meaning to forms. It’s also what we do in folk etymology, when the historically accurate etymology becomes opaque (or we simply override it). On a warm summer day, I included xeratask (to sit in the dry, warm, end-of-summer sunshine, doing nothing) partly to celebrate the day and partly to allude to the reinvention of xeriscape (landscaping in ways that reduce the need for water) as xeroscape. Xeri- is opaque and gets re-invented as zero, with the sense of waterless. You can expect xeroscape or even zeroscape to eventually win out. If you are an etymologue (one who confuses etymological faithfulness with precise usage), that will make you sad. But that’s life.

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