October 17 is International #PronounsDay. We have grammar day, mother language day, dictionary day, punctuation day! apostrophe day ’, talk like Shakespeare day, even talk-like-a-pirate day. But this is the first time that a part of speech gets its own day. And not just a part of speech, but a part of a part of speech. Oct. 17 is not a day to celebrate all pronouns. We don’t celebrate the interrogatives, demonstratives, and relatives, worthy as they may be. We don’t even celebrate all the personal pronouns. Instead, October 17 is set aside for just the third-person singular gender-neutral and nonbinary personal pronouns.
It’s the day for ze, hir, E, per, xi, ip, thon, heesh, co, um, le, and singular they. These may seem new, but they’re older than you think.
You will notice, from that list, that singular they is the only one of those gender-neutral pronouns to occur naturally in English, and it's a plural pronoun that doubled as a singular for more than 700 years. The invented gender-neutral pronouns, and there are many, are more recent. Only singular they is used by everybody who speaks English. All the others are used by a relatively small number of people and only in some contexts.
Oddly enough, according to the grammarians, the first gender-neutral pronoun was generic he. How can he be gender neutral? Only by denying reality.
Here's what happened: In 1542, William Lily wrote a Latin grammar, in English, proclaiming the ancient doctrine called the worthiness of the genders: “The Masculine Gender is more worthy than the Feminine, and the Feminine more worthy than the Neuter.” Henry VIII made Lily’s Latin the official grammar of all English schools. At the time, English was not considered a language worthy enough to have a grammar. But that soon changed, and when English grammars started to appear a century later, that worthiness doctrine led English grammarians to promote generic he. If you didn’t know the gender of an indefinite like someone or anyone, or a member of a class, like the reader or the student or the grammarian, grammar books—even a popular 18th-century grammar written by Ann Fisher—said we must refer to that person with the generic he.
In this 1542 triumph of toxic masculinity, Lily’s statement of the worthiness doctrine told students that men were more important than women.
Writing in 1770, the usage critic Robert Baker advocated a worthiness doctrine on steroids, suggesting that he was not just the first gender-neutral pronoun, it was the first pronoun, period. Baker was wrong, English never had just one third-person singular pronoun, but being wrong never stopped a usage critic. Baker went on to argue that having only one pronoun created a lot of ambiguity because, back in Old English times, nobody could be sure whether Æþelrad was talking about ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘them.’ Channeling the supposed creation of Eve from Adam’s extra rib, Baker claimed that English speakers formed she out of he to clear up the confusion. Except Baker never bothered to explain how she got its extra rib-like letter. Grammar works in mysterious ways.
You’ve probably never heard of William Lily or Robert Baker, but famous people also tackled the pronoun question, and they were doing so long before International Pronouns Day. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when he wasn’t in an opium haze or writing poetry, said in 1808 that it would make a great gender-neutral pronoun, as in, Every poet wants to see its work in print. Assuming that it was just one of Coleridge’s pipe dreams, everyone ignored its suggestion.
In 1851, a very sober John Stuart Mill complained that the lack of a gender-neutral pronoun forced him to use generic he, which was “more than a defect” in English because it rendered half the human species invisible.
Mill didn’t coin a pronoun to correct this defect, but in 1864, a writer identified only as J. W. L. came up with gender-neutral ze and recommended getting Noah Webster to endorse his coinage (“An Epicene Pronoun,” in “Notes and Queries,” The Ladies’ Repository, September 1864, p. 567). That would prove a problem, because Webster had died in 1843.
But there were plenty of living word coiners who were eager to supply Mill’s missing word. They came up with ou (1789), ne (ca. 1850), heesh (ca. 1860), er (1863), ve (1864), en, han, and un (1868 was a big year for pronouns), le (1871), e (1878), and ip (1884), to name just a few of the early ones.
In 1884, the American composer C. C. Converse invented thon. (Maybe you haven’t heard of Converse, but you might know a hymn he wrote, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”) Thon appeared in both Funk and Wagnalls' Standard Dictionary (1897) and Webster’s Second New International Dictionary (1934), but those dictionary endorsements—even the one from the shade of Noah Webster—didn’t win a lot of converts, and thon soon fell into disuse.
In 1912, Chicago school superintendent Ella Flagg Young “invented” heer, himer, and hiser. Young, who was famous in her day, said she made up the words on the way to a meeting of school principals, causing them to gasp. I put “invented” in quotes because Young's friend, Fred Pond, coined heer a year earlier, in 1911. That puts the well-known educator—Young had just finished a term as president of the National Education Association—in the awkward position of having plagiarized someone else’s pronouns. Now that would really make a principal gasp. Heer, himer, and hiser made it into Funk and Wagnalls' Standard Dictionary in 1913. Like thon, they were ignored.
Heer, hiser, and himer have been invented, and ignored, multiple times. So has ze, which copped a spot in the prestigious Oxford English Dictionary. Unfortunately, the OED missed that first ze in 1864. The dictionary only tracks ze back to 1972. But unlike the long-forgotten thon or heer, ze appears on many current lists of nonbinary pronouns, like this card from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, which floats around the internet. Though ze is much discussed online, it’s not clear that a significant number of people use ze IRL.
And in 1930, A. A. Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh, toyed with the idea of gender-neutral heesh:
If the English Language had been properly organized . . . then there would be a word which meant both ‘he’ and ‘she’, and I could write, ‘If John or Mary comes, heesh will want to play tennis’, which would save a lot of trouble.
But Milne was no gender pioneer. A few sentences later he abruptly dropped the idea of heesh, explaining that gender-neutral pronouns aren’t necessary because he can usually be read as she. Except that he is seldom read as she, which is why gender-neutral pronouns have become important enough to warrant their own day.
If these old and honorable nonbinary pronouns aren’t working for you, why not borrow one from another language? In 2017, the French government proposed iel and ille, which were promptly condemned by the French Academy, though condemnation by the stodgy French Academy could actually backfire, ensuring the success of iel and ille. Some Spanish speakers use elle instead of el and ella. The most successful invented gender-neutral pronoun so far is Swedish hen, coined in 1966 as an alternative to the masculine han and the feminine hon. Hen didn’t begin to spread until the 1990s, and although it’s far from universal, hen has become common enough in Sweden that it no longer needs to be explained. In 2015, the Swedish Academy, being more inclusive as well as more open to innovation than its French counterpart, accepted hen into its official dictionary.
If you don’t like any of the borrowed pronouns either, then why not coin your own? There are websites that will help you do that. Here’s a screen cap from Starfriends, a nonbinary dating site, showing how it’s done:
And Etsy offers artisinal pronoun buttons, pins, embroidered patches, t-shirts, pendants, mugs, and “Hello, my pronouns are _____” name tags. If neither the heirloom pronouns nor the foreign pronouns seem right for you and you’re not up to coining one yourself, and copying a friend's pronoun seems unethical, you could find someone on Etsy, or at your pronoun party, to design a custom pronoun for you.
And finally, if you’re stuck for a pronoun while you're stuck at home staring at a screen because, like me, you didn’t get invited to a pronoun party, in just one click an online pronoun generator will supply you with a pronoun that would make Ella Flagg Young and Fred Pond gasp.
