A Word, Please: Proposed ‘ze’ pronoun isn’t a singular idea
Have you heard the news? A number of colleges, including Harvard, are getting creative with the pronouns on their student application forms, offering the option of sidestepping old standards “he” and “she” in favor of a newly minted gender-neutral alternative like “ze.”
It’s creating quite a buzz in the media. But just between you and me, the buzz is a bust. Really, the news is about as earth shattering as revelations that some college will be serving frozen yogurt instead of ice cream in the dining hall. It just doesn’t amount to much.
Yet this stuff becomes big news because people like me assume that people like you will find it interesting, outrageous or maybe even fodder for some delicious righteous indignation. We know this from experience: Every time a well-intentioned effort to be considerate of people’s feelings veers toward silliness, villagers grab their pitchforks.
People like me are eager — too eager — to insert ourselves into the heated discussion. And voila, big news.
Yet this news isn’t even new. As I’ve reported here before, people have been trying for centuries to introduce a gender-neutral singular personal pronoun into the English language. Understandably so.
Consider this sentence: Every student should ensure that he or she brings his or her enrollment form with him or her to his or her designated classroom. This sentence starts off with the idea of a singular: “every student.” But there’s no singular pronoun that can cover both genders on all those subsequent references.
Sometimes you can rewrite the sentence to sidestep the awkward pronouns. But not always. In those cases we have three alternatives. We can use both genders every time: “him or her,” “he or she,” “his or hers.” We can assign a sex to our hypothetical student: “Every student should ensure that he brings his enrollment form with him to his designated classroom.” Or we can use “they” in its various forms: “Every student should ensure that they bring their enrollment form with them to their designated classroom.”
Each of these options has its problems. Choosing “he or she” every time can get too verbose. Choosing either “he” or “she” means rudely dismissing half your readers. And “they” will get you in all kinds of trouble with people who insist that this plural pronoun can’t be used in the singular.
So why not coin a new word, a brand-new term to fill the vacuum and solve everyone’s problem? Because language doesn’t work that way, that’s why. It evolves how it wants, when it wants.
In fact, since the mid-19th century, many pronouns have been proposed to solve this problem. They include thon, hu, hes, nie, en, lie, himer, hse, ve and hiser. Some of the campaigns to promote these words drew a lot of publicity. But none caught on. The language just doesn’t bend that way.
True, some parts of speech can be shoehorned into the lexicon. We add new nouns and verbs all the time. And the courtesy title “Ms.” only took a few decades to catch on. That’s why the universities offering enrollees the chance to be addressed with newly coined courtesy titles could actually have an influence. But the pronouns? Good luck.
As language expert John McWhorter pointed out at CNN.com, some parts of speech are incredibly stubborn. (Try coining a new preposition some time and you’ll see what I mean.) Pronouns are among them. People aren’t going to start using “ze” just because someone else thinks it’s a neat idea.
So what’s a writer like you to do? Well, as I said, the language evolves its own way. And for centuries now, it’s been marching slowly and steadily toward crowning “they,” “their” as “them” as singular pronouns. Shakespeare and Jane Austen are just two of the many revered writers who used singular “they.” You can, too, if you choose. Or, if you’re worried about hypercritical readers, you can choose your pronouns on a case-by-case basis.
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JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.