Monday, June 4, 2018

he, her, hers

This is a rather personal post, but I think it solves a problem that has been bedeviling writers and editors for some time now.

It has to do with the third person singular of the personal pronoun. This pronoun is gender-specific in all three cases: nominative: he, she; objective: him, her; and possessive: his, hers. This has led to a lot of handwringing in the gender-neutral world we now live in-- and some very tortuous locutions. When this first started becoming an issue, writers would say 'his or her' or 'his/her,' which is pretty clunky: 'Each student should put his or her notebook in the drawer.'  Later they tried putting things in the plural so they could use they, them, and theirs. 'Students should put their notebooks in the drawers.' This involved rewriting whole paragraphs and passages, though. Another ploy was to put everything in the passive voice, which was even worse: 'All notebooks should be put in the drawers.' And now we have a whole new issue with transgender people who don't fit into either of these 'binary' categories.

Solution: Just dispense with she, him, and his altogether. Simply dispatch them to the dustbin of syntactical history, along with thou, thee, and thine. Thus fragile male egos would preserve pride of place in the nominative case with he, but the female forms her and hers would obtain in the objective and the all-important possessive cases. The he- form is preserved in all three cases, for simplicity; and each term is totally inclusive and so would include all varieties of 'nonbinary' preferences.

Problem solved, and rather elegantly if I do say so myself.

No comments:

Post a Comment