The traditional gender agreement rule states that pronouns must agree with the nouns they stand for both in gender and in number. That means we either have to word our way round the problem by using plurals – which don’t mean quite the same thing – or we’re reduced to the verbose and clunking construction: ‘If an MP steals taxpayers’ money, he or she should be ashamed of himself or herself.’ (‘Themselves’, employed to stand for a singular MP, would, of course, be a grammatical abomination). It never ceases to infuriate me, for example, that in this cornucopia of a million words, there’s no simple, gender-neutral pronoun standing for ‘he-or-she’. As Tom Utley complains in the Daily Mail: 70)Įnglish is a language with a vocabulary so large that every word in it seems to have a dozen synonyms, and yet this particular semantic black hole remains unfilled. Do you know how many paragraphs I’ve had to tear down and rebuild because you can’t say, “Somebody left their cheese in the fridge”, so you say, “Somebody left his/her cheese in the fridge”, but then you need to refer to his/her cheese several times thereafter and your writing ends up looking like an explosion in a pedants’ factory? … I crave a non-risible gender-neutral (not “it”) third person sing pronoun in the way normal women my age crave babies. The whole pronouns-must-agree-with-antecedents thing causes me utter agony.
Recently, Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan called for a gender-neutral pronoun: Coiners of these new words insist that the gender-neutral pronoun is indispensable, but users of English stalwartly reject, ridicule, or just ignore their proposals.
Wordsmiths have been coining gender-neutral pronouns for a century and a half, all to no avail. They either call for such a pronoun to be invented, or they invent one and champion its adoption. Every once in a while some concerned citizen decides to do something about the fact that English has no gender-neutral pronoun.
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