Word Watch: More Pronouns
I came across this sentence a little while ago, and I’m sorry to say it shocked me: “… even the most hardcore sceptic knows their star sign…” (London Review of Books, May 2021). I wasn’t shocked by the sentiment expressed, of course, just by the ugly grammar.
Why couldn’t the writer have put: “…even the most hardcore sceptics know their star signs”? That obviates, simply and without fuss, the jarring change of person from “knows’ to “their…”
“Their” requires a plural antecedent. But we can no longer write “his” when we want to refer to people of mixed genders, a problem that, in the past, was always dealt with by the use of “his” to include females as well as males. Feminism has prohibited that, since it’s a supremely male chauvinist thought, begotten of the appalling masculine hegemony from which feminists have laboured to rescue us, to imagine that a male pronoun might represent females too.
(By the way, I’ve noticed that the once common feminist jibe “male chauvinist” is never met with now. We’ve all learnt to toe the feminist line and such accusations are no longer needed. In any case, simple-minded oppositions, or as we now say, “binaries”, are as antiquated as the titles “Mrs” and “Miss”.)
The only problem with all this is that the further we venture into these muddy political waters, by inventing ways around these newly-discovered triggers of profound umbrage, the more difficult it becomes to sort out what we want to say. Several new pronouns have been suggested to correspond with all the new genders that sensitive souls have been dreaming up in the brave new world of universal readiness to take offence. The more words you invent to fend off umbrage, the more words you condemn to uselessness. That’s not the way to see a language develop.
You will accuse me of male chauvinism, I’m sure. But my chauvinism is for the English language and its clear, elegant use in expressing all the notions we may have. I don’t see why it should be rendered clumsy and awkward in the cause of bullying us into thinking differently. I’d rather see ideas shaped by good grammar and mellifluous expression. Those qualities might in their turn manifest clear thinking and honest argument: that would indeed be persuasive.
But I’ve had a more positive encounter lately: I read in the Spectator an admission (by Mary Wakefield): “I glow with terrible, vampiric pride when my five-year-old so much as eats its breakfast”. Does that strike a strange note? “Its breakfast” – not “his” or “her” breakfast? It’s a reversion to the traditional usage of a neutral pronoun for a small child, but it strikes us as odd. We have become so frightened of hurting anyone’s feelings now that the gender of a baby is usually specified as though it were an adult.
Sociologists are especially fond of positing a female child in their examples, giving the impression that girls are more likely to be the subject of their investigations than boys – and that they are deeply sensitive to the gender issue. But in cases involving infants and young children, “it” is a perfectly satisfactory pronoun. People are so anxious to show their correctness and profound humanity, however, that they forget this.
“A one-year-old child has nothing to say about the food they are offered, but simply opens their mouth or shakes their head” (London Review of Books, July 2020). The singular verb with the plural pronoun jars horribly. Why on earth couldn’t the child be referred to as “it”, which would instantly make the sentence pleasant to read? Political correctness dictates that a one-year-old child cannot be demeaned by a neuter pronoun. Absurd!
The nonsense has been with us for a long time now, but perhaps if enough people are aware of its horrors, it will wither and disappear. And it can be even dafter than the examples I’ve given. In a radio programme on the intelligence of birds in August 2003, a jackdaw being studied was referred to as “he or she” – a laughable precaution against giving offence. Surely it wasn’t necessary to defer to the feelings of a bird in that ludicrous way?