Yo!
Posted By Ardellis on January 9, 2008
It seems that the younger generation in Baltimore is organically creating something that a lot of people have been trying to shoehorn into the English language for a long time now: an epicene (gender-neutral) third-person singular pronoun.
Mark Liberman over at Language Log has written a fascinating post on it.
Of course, there’s the problem that “yo” and “you” might become confused, which makes me think that this probably won’t ultimately have any more staying power than “thon” or “co” or any of the others that people have tried to artificially inject into the language over the years.
But maybe I’m wrong. The “sie/hir” construction seems to be fairly popular in certain online circles (though I find “zie/zir” less likely to confuse and less evocative of the German feminine pronoun “sie”).
And, truly, in an age when you can have conversations with and about a person without ever knowing either their biological sex or their gender orientation, when we’re beginning to realize that intersexed people are far more common than many would like to admit, when the word “genderqueer” can become a useful term, you have to admit that sooner or later we’re going to have to change the language to handle our broadened perceptions and our technological advances.
Comments
Leave a Reply