Some interesting language news (hat-tip to blueheron):
Street term ‘Yo’ is being used by kids as a gender-neutral replacement for ‘he’ and ‘she’, according to researchers.
Language experts in the US say since at least 2004 students have been saying “yo” as a substitute for gender specific pronouns and the trend is growing.
After previous attempts to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun failed, researchers suggested “yo” could become commonly used.
Experts said the growth of the word’s usage in this way was remarkable as it was a “grass-roots phenomenon”.
The study, published in this week’s New Scientist, found middle-school and high-school students in Baltimore, Maryland, used the word in sentences such as, “Yo put his foot up” and “Yo looks like a freak”.
There have been several attempts to create gender-neutral pronouns from trans activists and from feminists, but none of them has had much success; deliberate attempts to change English usage almost never work (although the example of “Ms.” is pretty inspiring). There might be more hope for “Yo,” because it’s creation seems more grassroots. ((“Grassroots” isn’t really the word I want to use, but I’m not able to think of what word it is I’m looking for.))
In the article, “feminist scholar” Brenda Wrigley criticizes “yo” for sounding “crass and disrespectful.” Boo on feminist scholar Brenda Wrigley! As BlueHeron notes,
“crass and disrespectful”, which can clearly be translated as both “I’m not used to people speaking like that” and “kids these days have no respect for language”, both of which are ultimately foolish and useless concerns and do nothing to stop the adoption of new words.
I really hope this use of “yo” spreads and flourishes.
“Grassroots” isn’t really the word I want to use, but I’m not able to think of what word it is I’m looking for.
Organic, perhaps?
I like this development, too — although I’m a little confounded by “Yo put his foot up.” Maybe I just need to be patient…maybe “yis” (his/hers) and “yer” (him/her) are just around the corner, heh.
Have you tried saying “Yo put yos foot up?” etc? Doesn’t sound good to me.
Actually, except for the “this sounds new to me vs this sounds familiar” aspect, I don’t think “yo put yos foot up” sounds any worse than “he put his foot up.” I think “yo put yos foot up” would be a good way for this to develop.
We definitely need such a word. Yo suits me, but then I’m crass.
Well, then, boo on me too.
I could argue that it’s overloaded (“yo” can mean “hey”) and that it sounds very similar to “you” and “your” (“This pizza is yo’s” vs. “This pizza is yours”) thus creating confusion.
But the real reason I don’t like it is that it sounds harsh and uncouth. Why not use something melodious, like “linoleum”?
I don’t like using that particular word for a few reasons, yo.
(This is how it’s used were I’m from.)
For one thing, “young people” use the word for a lot of things (as an exclamation, “you”, and like the word ‘dude’).
It’s also the Spanish word for “I” which can be a bit confusing..
A gender neutral pronoun is good idea but I think it should sound like ‘he and she’.. Maybe ‘ce’ or something. Yo just seems out of place.
I’m partial to letting “they” stage the same plural-to-singular takeover that “you” did a few centuries back. But que sera sera.
Why not use something melodious, like “linoleum”?
I couldn’t agree more with the word “linoleum.” To quote Barnes & Barnes:
Linoleum
Linseed oil solidified by
Oxidation
Actually, I suffered from the same misapprehension that SteveTwo mentions – the Spanish word for “I.” I did like the idea of using “I” in place of “he” or “she,” though.
“I put I’s foot up,” is wonderful.
Heh, reminds me of Knapsack Poems.
Anyways, what I’m mostly curious about is the motivation behind this. Did these kids start doing it specifically to be anti-essentialist, or because they just think the word sounds cool?
Sycorax, I wrote a little essay about (use of “they” and “their”) that on my blog. Which isn’t really a blog, but just a collection of brief writings.
http://teethwherenoneshouldbe.blogspot.com/2006/06/tell-your-best-friend-whoever-they-may.html
If we’re looking for something organic, this use (technically misuse) of the plurals has been going on for years, and is nearly ubiquitous among some groups.
“Heh, reminds me of Knapsack Poems.”
:-D
Speaking of which, I always liked “per” and “person.”
I just want a gender neutral pronoun. If it’s yo, it’s yo. If it’s zie, it’s zie. I have preferences, but the important thing is to have one.
Sorry for being so dense, but why does “he put his foot up” require a gender neutral term? The speaker is obviously talking about a male. Wouldn’t a gender -neutral term be better suited to replacing the awkward “he or she” or his or her? In the way that “one” and “one’s” can, albeit pretentiously.
Phil, I agree, “they” works pretty well, and I’ve been using it myself. However, there are a couple situations where it loses that nice natural sound. Suppose I wanted to remove the gender-specificity from:
She took all the cookies for herself.
Both of my possible choices, using “they”, just sound weird:
They took all the cookies for themselves. The plurality of “themselves”, with that obvious “s” affix, is a lot more noticeable than in “they” or “their” or “them”. It’s difficult for me to imagine a single person while saying it.
They took all the cookies for themself. There really isn’t any such word as “themself”. Both my internalized mental spell-checker and the one in my browser are complaining.
Bill, there’s a couple things about that:
1. In lots of cases, people use “he” anyways even if they strictly should be using “he or she”. That is, it would be pretty typical English usage for “he put his foot up” to be a sentence about a theoretical person whose gender isn’t relevant to the discussion.
2. More generally, there’s a good argument to be made for using non-gender-specific pronouns whenever you don’t actually need to refer to someone’s gender. Why is it important to constantly keep referencing the gender of every third party?
“Yo” and “Y’all” – we have long needed a gender neutral 3rd person and a plural 2nd person to be part of standard English, and these might as well start getting accepted.
DSimon,
You’re right about the way that “themself” falls on the ear, but I imagine that would be true for any syllable we put in front of “-self” besides him or her. “Yoself” strikes me as sounding a little odd, and perhaps doubly so because it’s phonetically similar to “yourself.”
This sentence in the bignewsday article struck me as interesting, and perhaps a little condescending:
“This showed me that students are not only using a new slang word because it’s cool. They are actually aware of the meaning of what they are saying.”
I wouldn’t think it should be assumed that the default stance on new slang is that students/young people don’t know the meaning of what they are saying. If anything, a lot of slang is particularly nuanced.
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Maybe it’s just me, but while I don’t have too much of a problem with yo being used as a gender-neutral pronoun (although, the fact that yo already has so many different meanings could cause problems in other areas of the country), I don’t understand it’s use in the examples given. I’ve read the sentences over and over, and maybe it’s just me, but both of them seem to be referring to a particular person, in which case a gender-neutral pronoun would be unneccesary. I really can’t see an instance in which either of those example sentences would need a gender neutral pronoun, hence, it’s a bit hard for me to see this being used as such in these cases.
To Bean, Bill, DSimon, and Phil . . .
Facebook could use “Yo.” When a user updates “his or her” profile. The news feed once said: “Matthew updated their profile.”
Doesn’t that sound disgusting? It should say, “Matthew updated his profile.” But there is no database that says Matthew is a male name and Sally is a female’s. You couldn’t have “Sally updated his profile.” That’s even worse, so they stuck with “they” and “their.”
Personally, I’m disgusted at the use of “they” for a gender-neutral, third-person pronoun. We sacrifice clarity in the quantity of the sentence’s subject to appease people uptight about gender roles in hypothetical sentences. The gender-neutral, 3rd-person pronoun that had been used for centuries in the past was “he.” And until feminists in a America spoke up about it, no one had a problem. For example:
In an essay when “someone” wants to write about a hypothetical individual for the sake of providing an example, he (and this is where “yo” would come in, the point at which, once upon a time, a woman complained that the someone in this scenario had to be a he and not a she) picks whatever pronoun “he” finds suitable.
Matt, I suspect you’d be less blase about the old “the male embraces the female” concept if it was your ox being gored. It is disconcerting to have every default or assumption be “not you”. But to counter this criticism, let me say that I looked at your blog and you have a lovely writing style. I bet the Arabic is helping.
Stephen Jay Gould did it best. He just started using “he” or “she”, “his” or “her”, apparently at random, whenever giving a hypothetical. I found it incredibly jarring at first, but I quickly got used to it, and now I do it myself, when I remember.
Of course, as an eeevil anti-feminist, I’m probably just doing that to put a firebreak in the path of the One True Gender-Neutral Pronoun (there is no Pronoun but “Yo”, and hipsters will be its prophets) that is coming. We’re devious that way, we EAFs.
My girlfriend is white and 24 with a Masters degree and she replaces random (as far as I can tell) words in her sentences with “yo”. It’s cute. And confusing.
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@Sycorax
Agreed. “They” has the advantage that it’s already being in use for this purpose. My wife used it nearly constantly when talking about our baby before he was born (and thus his gender was unknown), and I find that young people knew what she meant, but older folks got confused.
The only confusing part is conjugation. Read this sentance: My wife used it nearly constantly when talking about our baby before they were born.
I hope this catches on, but I would find it somewhat confusing to get used to, specifically because I am used to “yo” as an exclamation and because it sounds similar to “your,” as previously mentioned.
However, anything that gets more people feeling (and filling) the need for a gender-neutral or third-gender pronoun is all right by me.
:# The Black Fox Writes:
My girlfriend is white and 24 with a Masters degree and she replaces random (as far as I can tell) words in her sentences with “yo”. It’s cute. And confusing.”
Is she a Smurf?
Phil Writes (#10): “If we’re looking for something organic, this use (technically misuse) of the plurals has been going on for years, and is nearly ubiquitous among some groups.”
However, even people who employ plurals habitually do so in a way that limits their full applicability. “They” is employed only for indefinite referents; when the referent is a specific person, everyone seems to revert to “he,” “she,” or “umm.”
“maybe “yis” (his/hers) and “yer” (him/her) are just around the corner, heh.”
That’s one of the practical problems with this development -“yis” already exists in some dialects of Englishas a plural of “you”. The full form is “youse” and with vowel reduction it becomes “yis” or “yiz”.
The possible confusion with a Spanish from? Presumably both speakers would be able to keep track of which language they were speaking.
But we definitely need something like this though, and this is a good start. Gender distinctins on the third person are a waste of forms. What we really need is a way to distinguish between different third persons in an utterance, as in “He (John) said he (Tom) would do it.” In Algonkian languages they have this and it is often called the “fourth person”, kind of for fun.
I think yo is rightly doomed for the reasons above. “One” serves pretty well in many cases. Also I don’t think “he or she” or “she or he” is that bad. Alternating between the two can work in some contexts.
If it were up to me, we would use “it.” I would also use numerical designation in place of proper names, but then, I have no soul.
Matt, there’s no way that “he” can be a gender-neutral 3rd-person pronoun, because it’s explicitly male. The fact that the use of “he” as though it were gender-neutral was accepted without any pause until recently does not mean that its meaning has shifted. Rather, it indicates a shift in the general ability of our society to accept unthinking (though, in this case, relatively minor) sexism.
I can understand counter-arguments against feminist critiques of phrases like “mankind” and “manned spaceflight”. There’s an definite sense with these words that one form of “man” is being used instead of another more gendered definition. I can say “Jane, the inventor of the cancer vaccine, is a credit to mankind”, and that’s obviously just short for “humankind”, regardless of Jane’s gender. It’s still arguably sexist, but the intent of the sentence is clear.
But there’s no definition of “he” that I can use to refer to a woman named Jane, or any other woman. I cannot say “Whoever it is that invented the cancer vaccine, he is really fantastically awesome” if I want to include the possibility that Jane invented it. The well-understood definition of the word “he” prevents it from referring to someone who is even only potentially female. It’s not just that it’s sexist, it’s also unintelligible English.
See this definition of “he” in the American Heritage dictionary for a more linguistically knowledgeable discussion of the issue (I found it by just Googling for “definition of he”).
Ah, the wonders of Google. Good link, DSimon. It simplifies all 30 (and counting) comments attached to this post. I especially liked:
The sentence “A writer who draws on personal experience for material should not be surprised if reviewers seize on that fact” is complete as it stands and requires no pronoun before the word material. The sentence “Every student handed in his assignment” is just as clear when written “Every student handed in the assignment.”
So the answer might be to wholly omit the possessive pronoun. At least that part can be solved.
What would a yo yo be then? Both?
Matt, that only solves the problem for possessives, so I still have to use “he” and “him” or “she” and “her” whenever referring to a singular 3rd party.
I’m against gender essentialism, but I’m required by the conventions of my language to constantly be bringing up the gender of everyone around me, and everyone I refer to, in contexts where their gender isn’t relevant. From my perspective, that’s the vast majority of contexts. Plus, English pronouns as they are now create difficulties around people who don’t want a standard gender identification.
So, that’s why I’m happy to see things such the expanded use of “they” and “them”. Eventually, maybe I’ll have enough guts to actually start using it in place of gender-specific pronouns in my everyday communication. At the very least, it’ll probably spark some interesting conversations.
Well, if we’re going to get stuffy about it, isn’t Jane more likely an inventrix than an inventor?
@Bjartmarr
Inventress or inventrix? And why don’t we have doctresses? And until you saw it written down, did you even know that there was a word “comedienne”?
Actually, that’s why I wish we could ditch the feminine suffixes for professions – they’re so inconsistent, and in many cases nobody knows they exist. If simply reapplying the masculine form is good enough for things like “doctor”, why not everything else? I think that, besides the common ones in fields that have traditionally included women (stewardess, waitress – sad that I can only think of servile roles, eh?), most of them are unknown except for clever writers who want a nifty ten-dollar-word.
Here’s a trick for you: what is the feminine form of “research fellow”?
Inventress or inventrix? And why don’t we have doctresses?
I’m going to stick with inventrix here. Since “inventor” is, I’m pretty sure, from the latin, we should stick with latin suffixes.
The proper term is “lady doctor”, as you would know if you hung around curmudgeonly old men more often.
what is the feminine form of “research fellow”?
“Researchess fellow”. Duh.
(Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if “fellow” meaning “man” derived from “fellow” meaning “comrade”, not the other way around. So I would consider “fellow” to be technically gender-neutral, but seeing as how the first meaning is the only one used outside of academia, perhaps that distinction is, uh, academic.)
…I have never heard ‘yo’ used this way. I have heard people use yo’, as in a shortened your, but that’s not the same as yo, as in “Yo, shorty can spit!” or “Yo, pay attention!” or “That shit was mad cool, yo!”
Maybe I’m just hanging out with all the people speaking Japanese and not speaking street.
Matt:
The gender-neutral, 3rd-person pronoun that had been used for centuries in the past was “he.” And until feminists in a America spoke up about it, no one had a problem.
Yeah, us eeee-v-v-vil feminazis ruined it for everyone. How dare we ask people actually *think* about the language that we use? Pfffft.
RachelPhilPa (#37): “Yeah, us eeee-v-v-vil feminazis ruined it for everyone. ”
Yes, you did. Ever since Olde Englishe, “he” was understood to include the feminine when gender is unknown or not significant. And “man” was understood to include both genders—as it still does in German. Unfortunately, English lost the word for a specifically male human being a few hundred years ago: “wer.” (It survives today only as “werewolf” and a couple of other compounds.)
Why don’t we just adopt, say, the Cantonese 3d-person pronoun, which has neither gender nor number. Or Loglan, which has 5 of them, so you can refer to multiple different 3d persons separately.
Olorin, just because speakers of Old English found it cool to assume that all unknowns were male doesn’t mean that we are obliged to agree with that assumption. Challenging it does not ‘ruin’ anything.
“The gender-neutral, 3rd-person pronoun that had been used for centuries in the past was “he.” And until feminists in a America spoke up about it, no one had a problem.”
Obviously, someone had a problem with it then.
Unless of course you meant no one IMPORTANT had a problem with it. Meaning men.
“They took all the cookies for themselves. ”
The plurality of “themselves”, with that obvious “s” affix, is a lot more noticeable than in “they” or “their” or “them”. It’s difficult for me to imagine a single person while saying it.
Clearly if you have a problem imagining a single person from that sentence, which is isolated. But perhaps in a fuller context. A pronoun is always referring to something. If you were walking down the street and a guy jumped out in front of you and shouted “They took all the cookies for themselves!” you would naturally thing more than one person.
But in a typical context you might encounter that sentence, I think “they” works well because the plural implies possibility rather than specificity: “Where did all the cookies go?” “Someone must have taken them.” “And they took all the cookies for themselves! How selfish!”
To me, the plural works nicely; in fact I would say to me it sounds correct. While technically referring to “someone” which is singular, the realm of possibilities of who that ‘someone’ is naturally (again to me) falls into the plural.
But there seem to be two different reasons why we would want a gender neutral pronoun. One is when the pronoun refers to a specific human whose sex is unknown to the speaker, but is definitively sexed. The second is from trans activists or those who challenge the notion of gender/sex, etc. I think they are different issues and I’m not certain that they could be resolved with a single word.
A gender neutral pronoun in the former situation acts as a placeholder and can coexist with gendered pronouns. When the speaker discovers the gender of the person in question, that speaker (this would be a good place for that gender neutral pronoun) could then revert to a gendered pronoun. “I went to the doctor today.” “What did s/he say?” “She said there is nothing to worry about.” “Well did she tell you what you can do?”
But the latter situation is quite different. The gender neutral pronoun in that case would either replace gendered pronouns altogether or would be referring to a person who is of neutral gender. So if it were meant to coexist with gendered pronouns, it would serve as both a gendered placeholder and as an “it” that implies a person rather than a thing. It might be very difficult for something like that to arise organically.
The prohibition against “they” as a gender neutral pronoun is a recent and post-hoc justification cobbled together during a period of rules-mongering about English grammar, during which it was decided by some people who wrote grammar books that English should follow many Latin rules despite not being Latinate. Despite the fact that it sent early 20th century grammarians to their fainting couches, the use of “they” as a gender neutral pronoun actually has an established and useful history.
Everybody Loves THEIR Jane Austen
Michael, it seems like once a word is established as a gender-neutral personal pronoun, it could work just as easily for both of the purposes you’re talking about. What makes the latter so much more demanding?
Michael, it seems like once a word is established as a gender-neutral personal pronoun, it could work just as easily for both of the purposes you’re talking about.What makes the latter so much more demanding?
I think for the reason that we don’t use “it” as our gender neutral personal pronoun. Different connotations. As has already been discussed, “they” has a natural precedent and I think mentally conjures up the notion of unknown rather than the abolition or replacement of gendered personal pronouns. One has to imagine referring to one’s mother as “they”, because I think there will be a pull between the use of gendered pronouns when they are relevant (as in the case of “mother”) and when they aren’t relevant (in the case of “doctor”), so that if you truly want a gender-neutral personal pronoun when referring to a specific person who does not want a standard gender identification the same pronoun probably cannot also be used to refer to a person with a definite gender identification. Mentally they are different concepts and I imagine that an organic transformation will not happen readily.
Clearly I could be wrong, as we have many words with multiple meanings. But from my perspective, because they signify two distinct linguistic problems, there will either have to be two solutions or one use will have to arise from the other. But not being a linguist I might be talking out of my butt.
Please correct me if I misunderstand, but are you suggesting that there’s a need for one gender-neutral pronoun for people whose gender is defined outside the context of the conversation (i.e. they certainly have a gender, but the speaker/audience don’t know or care about that gender) and another pronoun for those whose gender isn’t defined in any context (i.e. those who don’t identify to a gender)?
If so, that seems to be going back to the same problem we had to start with! Now, if we’re talking about some hypothetical person eating cookies, we must limit that hypothetical to refer only to people who identify to a gender, or to only people who do not.
Or, I guess you could pick one of your two pronouns to refer, in hypothetical statements, to both categories. Except wouldn’t that cause the same problems as trying to use “he” in hypothetical contexts to mean the larger group?
Seems like the best solution is to have a personal pronoun that doesn’t reference gender at all, even to mark its absence.
In fact, yo has been used as a gender neutral pronoun since the mid 1990’s. On this page, the rational for the gender neutral use of yo has been described for many years. And on this page, we laid out the usage rules for yo as a replacement for he, she, his, hers, him, and her.
May the PLWYGYWO,
Dan
Yo! I forgot to mention that on our “Yo Page”, we provide a number of examples (text, video, and audio) of the usage of “yo” in the English language.
May the PLWYGYWO,
Dan
Are you hearing a local version of “yo” in your area? Usage of slang can vary greatly depending on the neighborhood, city or region.
“Yo” doesn’t look like a substitute for the pronouns “he” or “she” (3rd person pronoun) as much as a word for calling out to someone else energetically and loudly.
As I’ve heard it used, “yo” is an attention-grabbing version of the 2nd person pronoun, “you,” that incorporates aspects of “Hey!” It’s like “Hey, you!” in one word. It seems to have evolved from “your” and “you.”
Examples:
Yo mama don’t dance like mine.
Yo! Yo-yo, c’mere man! Hey, I’m talkin’ to yo!
Based on usage I’ve heard (I don’t live in the urban streets, so I could be wrong), the interpretation of “yo” above is incorrect.
This is based on what I’ve observed, and as many of us know, “anecdote is not the plural of data.”
One source that backs up my interpretation—perhaps not objective, but subject to some popular use–is the Urban Slang Dictionary at: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yo
Word up, yo!
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