What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She

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.

"For more than 200 years, writers have sought this missing English word. English has no pronoun that refers to 'either a man or a woman,' no word to use when gender is unknown, or irrelevant, or when it needs to be hidden... [T]here's no singular third-person gender-neutral pronoun. None. Which seems strange, because there are so many times when we need one."

I had no idea that people had been searching for, inventing, and arguing over pronouns for so long. The author successfully presents 40 years of research in this book, diving deep into the history of generic 'he,' singular 'they,' 'his or her,' generic 'she,' 'it,' 'one,' and even new pronouns. (Did you know that over 200 words have been invented in the hopes of filling this language void? I sure didn't.) The author eventually makes the argument that the "missing" word isn't missing at all; it's singular 'they,' which has been used (to grammarians' dismay) for hundreds of years.

Being a research piece, the book is a little dry and occasionally repetitive. But for a word nerd like me, it was fascinating to see the history of language politics, proving that words indeed matter.