After reading Skip’s post about xenopronouns, it occurs to me that a lot of people seem to be missing the point of pronouns.
The essential function of a pronoun is to make it possible to talk about someone that you don’t know anything about, e.g., Whoever wrote this didn’t know what he was talking about, or If a friend has been drinking, take his car keys away and send him home in a cab, or Who wants to donate ten percent of his salary to GraniteGrok?
(There are other uses for pronouns, but they are largely for convenience and style. You don’t want to always have to say things like Christopher left Christopher’s wallet in Christopher’s car, so Christopher needs to borrow twenty bucks to pay for Christopher’s drinks.)
It’s kind of like a variable in algebra, which lets you speak and reason about a quantity without knowing what the quantity is.
All of which is to say, if you have to know someone’s personal pronouns, they’re not really pronouns anymore. They’re labels, or titles, or nicknames — attached to the person instead of to the role the person plays in a sentence.
The simplest (and easiest) solution to all of this mishegoss would be, rather than making up new pronouns all the time, to just drop ‘she’ and always use ‘he.’ It was William of Occam who famously said that Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. That certainly applies here.
Applying Occam’s Razor to pronouns has the advantage of being backward compatible with hundreds of years of written materials — literary, technical, educational, and so on. All you’d have to do is admit that back when we were less enlightened, we thought we needed two sets of pronouns — ‘he’ and ‘she,’ ‘him’ and ‘her’ — where one set would suffice.
This is also consistent with the long-term trend in English towards making things simpler rather than more complex by streamlining things like verb conjugations, noun declensions, moods, cases, and so on. When in doubt, throw it out. If ‘she’ and ‘her’ are causing more problems than they’re solving, let them go the way of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and the subjunctive mood.
Anyway, if you think that this will all blow over — or if you just find it difficult to change old habits — then keep using masculine and feminine pronouns the way you were taught, and hope for the best.
But if you think that this is one of those situations where something has to change, and you’d like to exert some control over the direction of that change, one way to do it is to embrace the simpler, sleeker, more natural future that English has been moving towards for centuries.
Just use ‘he,’ ‘him,’ ‘himself,’ and ‘his’ for all singular persons — but whatever you do, don’t call them masculine! Just call them simplified. Or say that you’re using Occam’s pronouns.
