English is missing a word. I am always lost whenever I come to point where it would be necessary. When I do come up with a word, I never have confidence in it. And that sucks. It’s time for a new word to replace the void representing the third person gender-neutral singular. Here’s an example:
If an artist wants to be famous, ________ must have unique ideas.
Okay, let us examine the possibilities. If there is any context to suggest one gender or the other, you can use he or she with confidence. But if there is uncertainty, as there usually is, he is the correct choice of olde. I suppose that was the way things used to be. But as any language evolves, popular culture will change words and even the definition of correct grammar. He has become archaic, and even chauvinist. I suppose we have Latin to thank for that. Latin and its brood of romance languages use the masculine form, corresponding to he in English. But I think the English language has moved on.
Around the time of the Women’s Liberation movement, society decided that gender-specific words had to go. Equality for all words! Stewardess became flight attendant. Mailman became mail carrier. The replacement for he became he or she, or sometimes even the radical she. Using he or she became politically correct, and it still is today. It offends no one, it is neutral. But it still sucks. It is three whole words, for one thing. And it sounds very indecisive. The replacement also spawned a corollary, s/he. While you mostly see s/he in writing, it attempts to solve the three-syllable issue. But s/he suffers from a lack of eye-appeal and can take a second to pronounce. The quest continues…
The current trend is to use they, but that is by far the worst. They is just an evasion from the syllabic burden of he or she. It implies a plurality that simply does not exist. English teachers will not accept it, but most of my generation uses it without second thought. That could be remedied if a new word were to take its place.
So, what does that leave us with? We cannot use he, he or she, or they. That leaves us with precisely nothing. That is why I think we need a new word. It would solve all sorts of uncertainty problems. You could finally write in this situation with confidence, instead of rephrasing your sentences. I spent a little while brainstorming a word, and here is what I came up with: Shey.
If an artist wants to be famous, shey must have unique ideas.
It takes getting used to, but it works. It combines all the previous forms of he, she, and they. If someone can come up with a better idea, be my guest. But for now, shey is the solution!
There've been 26 whole comments
6:56 pm on 11/17/2005 1. Rich Boakes
That’s coder-speak, it’s a sentence constructed with an if/then construct, but it’s the same as saying: “An artist that wants to be famous must have unique ideas.”
The English teachers are right, but language evolves. Embrace it.
What you’ve stumbled upon is one reason why new words get invented. In this case a language construct from one parlance is being used in another, where previously an entirely different phrasing would have been commonplace.
If you’re lucky you’ll have such situations named after you…
Jalenack (n), a lexical impasse where no suitable word exists that can complete the sentence one has started.
7:10 pm on 11/17/2005 2. Andrew
Aye, you’ve caught me. That is indeed coder speak. I’ll leave the example alone, as it does work effectively either way.
I like that definition for Jalenack. People always ask me what Jalenack means (it is actually nonsense). Maybe I’ll start handing that one out.
7:57 pm on 11/17/2005 3. Neil Kelty
Shey and interesting word, it sounds wieird but I guess if we used it enough it really wouldn’t sound that wierd. Nevertheless, this he/she thing has also been a pet peeve of mine, espcially when writing to a group because then the letter just isn’t personal anymore.
On a side note, WHERE not what does it mean, WHERE did you come up with Jalenack?
By the way, great post I really enjoyed it, and I hope whomever reads this, whether it be a he or she
will get something out of this. Maybe I can get this to be an off topic discussion in English class tomorrow.
8:11 pm on 11/17/2005 4. Anonymous
it makes no sense to use “shey”… it is not much shorter than he/she might as well make it h/s or something
8:30 pm on 11/17/2005 5. Andrew
Oh, but it is shorter. Say “He or She” out loud, then say “Shey.” While it may not take up much less space, it’s two less syllables. And that makes a world of difference.
Jalenack is completely a nonsense creation. I believe I was playing around with letters one day and it popped into my head.
I think I may present this little essay to my english teacher. Perhaps she’d get a kick out of it…
8:47 pm on 11/17/2005 6. Carie
I completely agree with your idea or ’shey’! It’s funny (or is sad?) how we’re still at a loss for words that are so necessary while completely useless slang terms are being added to the English language every year…
8:59 pm on 11/17/2005 7. Arti
Oh Andrew, so silly. But you are right we do need a shorter way a gender neutral subject. Could it ever catch on though? I’m sure that people thought of a gender neutral pronoun before but it never caught on. why would yours be different? What would set shey apart from all other attempts?
10:31 pm on 11/17/2005 8. Nella
Fuck that. “They” works with the utmost perfection. Hasn’t anyone seen “Chasing Amy”? The lesbian has to avoid telling her girlfriends that she’s going out with a guy, so when asked, “Where is this person from?,” she answers,”Oh, they’re from New Jersey, like me.” Everyone understands her. And if you’re understood, what more could you possibly need from language? Actually, I think it’s high time we drop language entirely and communicate solely through facial expressions. That would be way better.
Hmmm…I think Nella should be a type of vanilla flavored cookie.
7:51 am on 11/18/2005 9. Sam
And how would you propose pronouncing h/s? I see no vowels. It would be nice if this new word could not only be used in writing but in speech as well. Like shey or they. I like how most of the least thoughout comments are left by people who do not leave a name.
Nella has a point though we could just start accept they as being not only a non-gender specific plural but as also being a singular non-gender specific classification.
7:21 pm on 11/19/2005 10. Ricardo
How about taking things back a couple of steps and using the term “thou”. A little Shakespear-ish, but fits the blank!
PS: Great blog. Greatings from Portugal
1:09 am on 11/20/2005 11. SuperDave
My God, Andrew, you’ve finally done it, you’ve discovered something wrong with the English langauge! Who could have guessed?
Frankly, aruging about how a laungauge has no one word for singular neutral specific pronoun that does not, in certain cases, hint multiple subjects, seems a tad frivolous.
All you have to do to avoid confusion and/or gender equality issues is just restate the subject, e.g.
Using an extra word isn’t that fricking bad, we use a suprising number of extra words in polite conversation about pointless things like the weather. In using that extra word you side-step the dilemmas of gender, number and having to make up a new word.
2:01 pm on 11/20/2005 12. Andrew
That doesn’t sound too hot, does it?
2:50 pm on 11/20/2005 13. SuperDave
It would acually make sense as “my sidekick”, “they” would aslo work because in the previous sentence you specifed a single person, but that’s beside the point. This example is refering to one specific person with a dinfinative gender, whereas the artist one refers to anyone of either gender. In the sidekick case you won’t offend anybody by using “he” if its a dude, the only reason to use “my sidekick” would be if you wanted to conceal the gender.
9:59 pm on 11/22/2005 14. Andrew
Meh. The point of my article is the uncertainty. Sure, there are ways around it. Sure, there are viable alternatives. But you never really have confidence in what you’re saying. I’ll present one last example:
Hmm, that’s actually an excerpt from an English essay I’m typing up right now. I showed this article to my teacher, perhaps she’d accept shey.
12:10 am on 11/25/2005 15. Kevin
You are a GENIUS. but what if you want it to be plural and gender sesitive like, “At the all girls school, _______ ate cookies” if some one comes and wants to make that word, the invention of THIS word will make the invention of THAT word very difficult as the obvious two for gender sensitive plurals are, Hey and Shey. thats why it should be Chey.
5:22 am on 11/29/2005 16. Michael G
Ta must have unique idea. Sorry this is not original. Mandarin uses Ta for male or female.
You will regularly hear Chinese speakers call males ’she’ and females ‘he’ for this reason.
So Ta fits the bill.
I want to talk about ‘the’ now. What a fucking useless word it is.
Again with the mandarin. Chinese don’t use it at all and I already hated ‘the’ as a useless stupid word.
Finished now.
12:55 pm on 12/10/2005 17. Aaron
We could drop the gender-specific pronouns altogether in favour of the ambiguous “it”.
I mean, the subject “an artist” isn’t gender-specific in itself, so why should the pronoun be? Because it always used to be, but times are a changin’. My vote’s for “it”.
Works there, because we’re being specific to gender. “It” may offend some by suggesting asexuality, but that’ll only happen when we’ve mentioned gender on the subject and used the wrong pronoun:
See? Offensive. But even by today’s rules and practices, it’s incorrect.
1:03 pm on 12/10/2005 18. Aaron
Someone may argue that using “it” could make for confusion in some situations, but I think I can defend at least one foreseeable problem:
I’ve used “it” twice, and it could be confusing which subject was ugly. I think in cases with two subjects, the gender of the artist will always be known (or there’ll be multiple artists and thus we could get away with “they”) so the correct phrase would be:
No more confusion. Bleh. I’ll be thinking about this for a while…
12:13 pm on 12/13/2005 19. Gav
I believe the correct word to use in the situation is “one”. In this context one is not neccesarily either singular or first person. Try it, shouts out to my high school language teacher, Mr. Thomas.
7:55 am on 12/14/2005 20. Sam
One is usually used for a replacement of the word you in formal essays in order not to engage the reader, if you will. One is not really a third-person pronoun.
In this sentence replacing one with she or he would not work but the word you does.
3:19 pm on 12/18/2005 21. nik
You’ve got it all wrong - you’re thinking about it backwards. Why come up with a gender-nuetral word if their are no genders? I say make all humans gender nuetral, and then have one word for everyone. Hell, make humans inanimate objects while you’re at it - that way, instead of he, she, or it, we have one word. The only debate would be which word to adopt…
9:11 am on 12/30/2005 22. thou
Well you could pull back out the english word that used to be used for this of ‘thou’.
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