4/18: pronoun pick-me-up
It was a strangely difficult day--made more difficult because I didn't expect it to be that way. But my pronoun talk was this evening, and it went well (I think). People laughed and seemed interested, and I got to meet and talk with some people whose paths I might not otherwise have crossed.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
... Right after I had checked my mobile phone the phone rang. A friend - who lives abroad but is home for holidays and whose call I was expecting - told me she had just finished a seminar but was 10 km away... which so happened to be a few yards away from where I was standing that very second. 5 years of not seeing each other and only few e-mails, gone in an instant. An unexpectedly great meeting.
I'd be interested in what that pronoun talk was exactly about... What exactly do you mean "using they, them, their in the singular" if you don't mind my asking?
How great that you got to see your friend, Meri!
And my talk was about what we should do in English since English grammars tell us that we should use "he, him, and his" in a general human sense as well as in a specific gendered sense. I talked about ways in which that generic use of "he, him, and his" is problematic (because it can't really be ungendered) and how English speakers have tried to get around the difficulty, especially in academic writing. I follow linguists like John McWhorter who maintain that there's a tradition of using "they, them, and their" in English in the singular, so that it doesn't carry any gendered connotation. People in the audience seemed glad to have someone tell them that it's okay to use "they, them, and their" this way, since most English speakers do it naturally in conversation but are told it's wrong in writing.
Post a Comment