David Weir reviewed What's Your Pronoun? by Dennis Baron
The missing word is...
5 stars
I finished reading the main part of this book a while ago, but the detailed chronology of English-language gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns took me some more time to digest (it takes up sixty pages, a quarter of the book).
In any case, I really enjoyed it. I loved the sardonic tone deployed when discussing the rants of anti-feminists, as well as historical skeptics of gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns.
The author argues (and one of the chapters is titled) "the missing word is 'they'", and he provides a number of arguments to support this. Most interesting (and new to me) was the journey taken by 'you' from plural pronoun to also take on the role historically held by 'thou'. I also was not aware that 'they' is from Old Norse þeir.
Language is complicated, and ultimately, I believe it should generally be left alone and allowed to evolve (but this book …
I finished reading the main part of this book a while ago, but the detailed chronology of English-language gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns took me some more time to digest (it takes up sixty pages, a quarter of the book).
In any case, I really enjoyed it. I loved the sardonic tone deployed when discussing the rants of anti-feminists, as well as historical skeptics of gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns.
The author argues (and one of the chapters is titled) "the missing word is 'they'", and he provides a number of arguments to support this. Most interesting (and new to me) was the journey taken by 'you' from plural pronoun to also take on the role historically held by 'thou'. I also was not aware that 'they' is from Old Norse þeir.
Language is complicated, and ultimately, I believe it should generally be left alone and allowed to evolve (but this book provides the example of 'hen' in Swedish as a successful intervention that caught on). Many of the historical doomsayers and critics of English sound a lot like present-day critics of how the language is developing. One should take them all with a pinch of salt, I think, and revel in the ways in which language evolves.
