From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) :
Epicene \Ep"i*cene\, a. & n. [L. epicoenus, Gr. ?; fr. 'epi` + ?
common; cf. F. ['e]pic[`e]ne.]
1. Common to both sexes; -- a term applied, in grammar, to
such nouns as have but one form of gender, either the
masculine or feminine, to indicate animals of both sexes;
as boy^s, bos, for the ox and cow; sometimes applied to
eunuchs and hermaphrodites.
2. Fig.: Sexless; neither one thing nor the other.
The set of epicene pronouns I use is:
| Gendered | Epicene | |
|---|---|---|
| She/He | Xe (pron. "zee") | |
| Her/Him | Xim (pron. "zim") | |
| Her/His | Xer (pron. "zer") | |
| Hers/His | Xers (pron. "zers") | |
| Herself/Himself | Ximself (pron. "zimself") |
I don't bother with using androgyne or neuter genders, I just use Xe for everyone whose gender is not definitely known to me. Possibly this is as insulting as He, but there's little call for it at present.
I chose "Xe" out of the many proposals because it's the most obvious to people in a technical context who are used to seeing X as a metasyntactic variable.
Using "he" as the gender-neutral third-person pronoun is INSULTING to women, and presumes that only males matter. It has a long history of being used as the neutral pronoun, but that's because our ancestors were a bunch of bigoted dickheads. I refuse to be a bigoted dickhead, so I'm left with five choices:
#1 is utterly unacceptable to me. There's a sort of wishy-washy version of this, where you alternate pronouns in alternate chapters or paragraphs, but that comes out very strange, IMO.
Rephrasing is my first approach, then I apply one of #3-#5 if the pronoun can't be discarded.
Using a neologism is the most precise solution, but of course there's little or no chance of it becoming widespread, and few neologism users agree on the pronouns. It doesn't usually bother technical people or most SF fans who are used to weird pronouns, but it freaks out the mundanes. I don't give a damn about mundane reactions, but most people aren't me (<obvious joke here>), so this may not be an option for everyone.
I use "it" quite a lot to refer to people I don't like; if I'm not really happy acknowledging someone's humanity, "it" it is. I'm well-known to be a vicious bastard when crossed (and equally generous when not), so it's no problem for me, but more polite people probably shouldn't take this approach.
And finally, "they". It works. It's not pleasing, but for a general audience, it's the best solution in a pack of bad alternatives. It also has some historical precedent, which the others do not.
I love and defend good English, but there are limits; when obedience to grammatical rules causes me to inadvertantly insult (or fail to insult, if that is my intent) my reader, I am willing to adopt the least harmful change necessary. If this troubles you, I do not apologize.
From: mkkuhner@evolution.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) Subject: Re: epicene pronouns Date: 1998/07/24 Message-ID: <6pap27$ku8$1@nntp3.u.washington.edu>#1/1 References: <27C006F12CC0A352.jorj@110.net> <6p8sf9$k8a$1@animal.blarg.net> <mt1u1.1420$MV.932453@news.teleport.com> <3C7D9B28A78E0990.jorj@110.net> X-Complaints-To: help@cac.washington.edu X-Trace: nntp3.u.washington.edu 901310343 21448 (None) 140.142.17.37 Organization: University of Washington Genetics Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written In article <3C7D9B28A78E0990.jorj@110.net>, Jorj Strumolo <jorj@110.net> wrote: >quote from Greg Egan: >>> Ve was wearing the same shirt I'd seen ver in at the airport. >>> Ve yelled toward the loading bay; vis cry sounded weak to me. > So you don't have problems with the idea of such pronouns, only > with Egan's particular choice of forms. I'd hazard that if you > read _Distress_, simply being exposed to the pronouns at length > you'd get used to them. I think it's only those people who > dismiss the notion of such pronouns entirely that wouldn't. I had a lot of trouble not hearing ve/ver/vis as related to Latin "vir" [male] and found that annoying: surely people trying to deconstruct gender would avoid that particular association? Sie/hir have pronounciation problems but work well in writing. I belonged to an online game for a while which used e/eir which also became quite natural in writing. (I suppose the latter is pronounced "ear" or nearly so?) If you're going to change a ubiquitous little word like "he" you need a *very* good replacement: it's going to be used a lot and needs not to cause any kind of stress in speaking or writing, or people will not stick to it. I will say this for _Distress_: the ungendered main character worked for me in that my subconscious never did manage to assign ver a gender (whereas it's persistantly convinced that Estraven is male). I didn't like the book otherwise, but I liked that character a good deal. Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu
From: Jorj Strumolo <jorj@110.net> Subject: Re: epicene pronouns Date: 1998/07/26 Message-ID: <14A31B1A5D674011.jorj@110.net> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <mt1u1.1420$MV.932453@news.teleport.com> <3C7D9B28A78E0990.jorj@110.net> <35bb5e54.70022509@news.concentric.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written rrhorton@concentric.net (Rich Horton) RH> I'll just add that Egan's choices were the > first that seemed to work for me. I rather agree with Mary K. Kuhner's MK> I had a lot of trouble not hearing ve/ver/vis as related to > Latin "vir" [male] and found that annoying: surely people trying > to deconstruct gender would avoid that particular association? The maleness does seems off. Perhaps for the other gender, the hypermale one (which name I can't recall). I think if I were trying for a specific asex pronoun, I'd try one that sounded more "asex" somehow. Is "asexual" neuter? (I see some shadings there, just as I do between "hermaphrodite" and "androgyne".) In any case, in _Distress_ one does get neutered to become asex. Perhaps ne/nur/nem. (Technically the first is a word, but it's used much more rarely than the feminine "nee".) rrhorton@concentric.net (Rich Horton) writes: RH> "ve" and "ver" and "vis" are all "not words" (a reason not > to use "vim" for "ver"), "consistent", and "sound like but are > unambiguously different" from their gendered parallel forms. The "not words" bit will always be a problem. I mean, "vis" *is* a word alone (force, strength; related to vim), or as part of vis-a-vis. I wouldn't suggest "vim" because it's even more common a word. But even "ver" will have problems, from the similarity to "vir" and as short for "version." Pick any three parallel pronouns, and some of them have to be words, or strongly suggestive of words. On parallelism, I think the forms are not as close as they could be. Given she/her/her and he/his/him, it's easy enough to see that the new nominative pronoun has to be "?e". But "her" does double duty, so I wouldn't choose my next parallel from there. Of his/him, I'd reject "his" as suggestive of a plural, and pronunciationally unclear. (If you do a "?is" form, would you rhyme it with "sis" or "his" or even "bis"?) So I'd go with "?im" and then take "?er" as balances. The "?er" also works better since it extends to parallel "hers". RH> And I think (aesthetically) that the "v" sound > is a good choice for the starting consonant. Too male, IMAO. For true neuter, I'd use "n" as the base, since that would seem based on the word. (Not that "h" or "sh" is based on "male" or "female" in English, but you have to start somewhere.) For a situation where you don't know or care about gender, I used "x", commonly used for something variable or unknown. Pronunciationally perhaps a tad off. It's pronounced as "z" as is usually the case in English with words starting with "x". One might ask why a real "z" isn't therefore used. I just liked the symbolism of "x". It seemed appropriate. RH> I for one would vote for adoption of these words as standard for a > person of neutral or unknown gender. (I don't have a good way to > distinguish between people who are "neuter" and "hermaphrodite", > though, vis Raphael Carter's fine article about Bull's _Bone > Dance_.) There are three categories, I think. No-gender, both-genders, unknown gender. I don't see neuter and unknown as synonymous. I'd give both neuters and androgynes their own prounoun sets, and also have a set for general "the reader is left to draw <pronoun> own conclusions" statements, where there is probably a gender, but you just don't happen to know it, or it doesn't matter. Gender\Case | Nom. | Obj. | Poss. | P.A. | Reflexive -------------+-------+-------+-------+------+----------- female | she | her | her | hers | herself male | he | him | his | his | himself neuter | ne | nem | nur | nurs | nemself androgyne | pe | pem | pir | pirs | pemself epicene | xe | xim | xer | xers | ximself As for adopting a set as a standard, forget it. People get way too involved in gender. I've gotten flamed simply for using "xe" here, by some soul apparently offended by the mere notion of epicene pronouns. MK> I will say this for _Distress_: the ungendered main > character worked for me in that my subconscious never did > manage to assign ver a gender (whereas it's persistently > convinced that Estraven is male). I didn't like the book > otherwise, but I liked that character a good deal. I think my subconscious took both as mostly male, though it did stumble over it at times. (One of these days I really have to reread Melissa Scott's _The Unkindly Ones_ and see what I make of Trey Maturin this time, now that I know something I apparently totally missed when I read it.) I don't think that parts of _Distress_ hung together as well as they might. Voluntary Autism, for example. A notion I, as someone lousy at emotion interpretation, found fascinating. Nothing was done with it. And these varieties of "imagining reality into existence" things Egan does just don't seem to click with me. Interesting, yes, but I can't really buy that merely gazing at the stars affects the inhabitants thereof, and so on.
Linguist List: Vol-3-282. Mon 23 Mar 1992.
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 92 9:48:07 CST
From: Dennis Baron <baron@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Subject: common gender pronouns
In view of the interest in the common gender pronoun I am enclosing
a list summarizing my findings to date on the state of proposals
dealing with the issue.
debaron@uiuc.edu
The Epicene Pronouns:
A Chronology of the Word That Failed
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ca. 1850 ne, nis, nim; hiser NY Commercial Advertiser, 7
August 1884, 3.
1868 en Cited by Richard Grant White. The Galaxy, August,
241-44.
1884 thon, thons Charles Crozat Converse. The Critic, 2
August, 55.
hi, hes, hem Francis H. Williams. The Critic, 16
August, 79-80.
le, lis, lim (from the French); unus; talis Edgar
Alfred Stevens. The Current, 30 August, 294.
hiser, himer (hyser, hymer) Charles P. Sherman. The
Literary World, 6 September, 294.
ip, ips Emma Carleton. The Current, 20 September,
186.
1888 ir, iro, im (sg.); tha, thar, them (pl.) Elias Molee,
Plea for an American Language (Chicago: John
Anderson), 200-01.
1889 ons (from one) C.R.B. Writer 3: 231
1890 e (from he), es, em (from them) James Rogers of
Crestview, Florida. Writer 4: 12-13
1891 hizer Forrest Morgan. Writer 5: 260-62.
ith George Winslow Pierce. The Life-Romance of an
Algebraist (Boston: J.G. Cupples), 35.
1912 he'er, him'er, his'er, his'er's Ella Flagg Young.
Chicago Tribune, 7 January, 1:7.
1914 hie, hiez, hie (phonetic spellings of he, hes, he)
Language reformer Mont Follick, in The Influence
of English (London: Williams & Norgate, 1934), pp.
198-99, prefers to reduce all third person sg.
pronouns to this simplified version of the
masculine paradigm. He further suggests
discarding the possessive altogether in favor of
the prepositional phrase, ov hie.
1927 ha, hez, hem; on The Forum 77: 265-68 Attributed by
H. L. Mencken to Lincoln King, of Primghar, Iowa.
(American Language [N.Y., Knopf, 4th ed., 1936],
460n).
hesh (heesh), hizzer, himmer; on Fred Newton Scott
(Scott mentions earlier creation of on). The
Forum 77: 754; Mencken adds, "In 1934 James F.
Morton, of the Paterson (N.J.) Museum, proposed to
change hesh to heesh and to restore hiser and
himer" (American Language Supp. 2, 1948, 370).
ca. 1930 thir Sir John Adams; cited by Philip Howard, New
Words for Old (N.Y.: Oxford University Press,
1977), 95.
1934 she, shis, shim (gender-specific parallel to he, his,
him) Cited by Phillip B. Ballard, Thought and
Language (London: Univ. of London Press), 7-8.
1935 himorher; hes (pron. [h s]), hir (pron. [hir]), hem;
his'n, her'n "The Post Impressionist."
Washington Post, 20 August, 6.
1938 se, sim, sis Gregory Hynes, "See?" Liverpool Echo, 21
September; cited by H. L. Mencken (American
Language Supp. 2, 1948 370).
ca. 1940 heesh A. A. Milne; cited by Maxwell Nurnberg, What's
the Good Word? A New Way to Better English (N.Y.:
Simon and Schuster, 1942, 88-90).
1945 hse Buwei Yang Chao, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese
(N.Y.: Vintage, Random House, 3rd ed., 1963, rpt.
1972), xxiv.
1970 she (contains he), heris, herim Dana Densmore,
"Speech is the Form of Thought," No More Fun and
Games: A Journal of Female Liberation (April);
cited in Media Report to Women 3.1 (January 1975):
12.
co (from IE *ko), cos Mary Orovan, Humanizing English
(N.Y.: the author).
ve, vis, ver Varda (Murrell) One. Everywoman, 8 May,
2.
1971 ta, ta-men (pl.); a borrowing from Mandarin Chinese.
Leslie E. Blumenson, New York Times, 30 December.
1972 tey, term, tem; him/herself Casey Miller and Kate
Swift, "What about New Human Pronouns?" Current
138: 43-45.
fm Paul Kay, Newsletter of the American
Anthropological Association 13 (April): 3.
it; z Abigail Cringle of Edgerton, Maryland, rejects
epicene it, prefers z. Washington Post, May 2,
Sec. A, 19.
shis, shim, shims, shimself Robert B. Kaplan,
Newsletter of the American Anthropological
Association 13 (June): 4.
ze (from Ger. sie), zim, zees, zeeself; per (from
person), pers Steven Polgar of Chapel Hill, North
Carolina, proposes the ze paradigm; John Clark
offers per. Newsletter of the American
Anthropological Association 13 (September): 17-18
1973 na, nan, naself June Arnold, The Cook and the
Carpenter (Plainfield, Vt: Daughters, Inc.).
it; s/he Norma Wilson et al., editors, "A Woman's New
World Dictionary," 51%: A Paper of Joyful Noise
for the Majority Sex, 3-4.
s/he; him/er; his-or-her Cited and rejected by Gordon
Wood, "The Forewho--Neither a He, a She, nor an
It," American Speech 48: 158-59.
shem; herm Quidnunc, "Thon--That's the Forewho,"
American Speech 48: 300-02.
se (pron. [si]), ser (pron. [sIr]), sim (pron. [sIm]),
simself William Cowan, of the Department of
Linguistics, Carleton University (Ottowa), Times
Two 6 (24 May): n.p.
j/e, m/a, m/e, m/es, m/oi; jee, jeue Monique Wittig
employs the slashed pronouns as feminines, and
cites the latter two which employ the more
traditional feminine e; Le corps lesbien (Paris:
Editions de Minuit); The Lesbian Body, trans.
David LeVay (London: Peter Owen, 1975).
1974 ne, nis, ner Mildred Fenner attributes this to Fred
Wilhelms. Today's Education 4: 110.
she (includes he) Gena Corea, "Frankly Feminist,"
rpt. as "How to Eliminate the Clumsy `He,'" Media
Report to Women 3.1 (January 1975): 12.
en, es, ar David H. Stern of Pasadena, California,
The Los Angeles Times, 19 January, Sec. 2, p. 4.
hisorher; herorhis; ve, vis, vim Cited by Amanda
Smith, Washington Post, 11 April, Sec.A, 29.
shem, hem, hes Paul L. Silverman of Rockville,
Maryland, Washington Post, 17 December, Sec. A,
17.
1975 hir, herim (facetious) Milton Mayer, "On the
Siblinghood of Persons," The Progressive 39
(September): 20-21.
hesh, himer, hiser, hermself Jan Verley Archer, "Use
New Pronouns," Media Report to Women 3.1
(January): 12.
se (pron. [si]) H. R. Lee of Alexandria, Virginia,
Forbes 116 (15 August): 86.
ey, eir, em; uh Christine M. Elverson of Skokie,
Illinois, Chicago Tribune, 23 August, Sec. 1, p.
12.
h'orsh'it (facetious blend of he, she, or it) Joel
Weiss of Northbrook, Illinois, Forbes 116 (15
September): 12.
1976 ho, hom, hos, homself (from Lat. homo, `man,' and
prefix homo-, `the same, equal, like') Donald K.
Darnell, in Donald K. Darnell and Wayne
Brockriede, Persons Communicating (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall), 148.
he or she; to be written as (s)he Elizabeth Lane
Beardsley, "Referential Genderization," in Carol
C. Gould and Marx W. Wartofsky, eds., Women and
Philosophy (N.Y.: G.P. Putnam's Sons), 285-93.
she, herm, hs (facetious; pron. "zzz") Paul B.
Horton, "A Sexless Vocabulary for a Sexist
Society," Intellect 105 (December): 159-60.
it Millicent Rutherford, "One Man in Two is a Woman,"
English Journal (December): 11.
ca. 1977 po, xe, jhe Cited as recent and ephemeral by Casey
Miller and Kate Swift, Words and Women: New
Language in New Times (Rpt., N.Y.: Anchor Press,
130). Paul Dickson, Words (1982), p. 113,
attributes jhe, pronounced "gee," to Professor
Milton A. Stern of the University of Michigan.
E, E's, Em; one E was created by psychologist Donald
G. MacKay of the University of California at Los
Angeles.
1977 e, ris, rim Werner Low, Washington Post, 20 February,
Sec. C, 6.
sheme, shis, shem; heshe, hisher, himmer Thomas H.
Middleton, "Pondering the Personal Pronoun
Problem," Saturday Review 59 (9 March). Sheme,
etc. proposed by Thomas S. Jackson of Washington,
D. C.; Middleton refers to proposals for heshe,
hisher, himmer.
em, ems Jeffrey J. Smith (using pseudonym TINTAJL
jefry) Em Institute Newsletter (June).
1978 ae Cited by Cheris Kramer(ae), Barrie Thorne, and
Nancy Henley, "Perspectives on Language and
Communication," Signs 3: 638-51, as occurring in
fiction, especially science fiction.
hir Ray A. Killian, Managers Must Lead! (AMACOM)
press release; cited in "The Epicene Pronoun Yet
Again," American Speech 54 (1979): 157-58.
hesh, hizer, hirm; sheehy; sap (from homo sapiens)
Tom Wicker, "More About He/She and Thon," New York
Times, 14 May, Sec. 4, p. 19 Hesh etc. proposed
by Prof. Robert Longwell of the University of
Northern Colorado; sheehy by David Kraus of Bell
Harbor, N.Y.; sap (facetiously) by Dr. Lawrence S.
Ross, of Huntington, N.Y.; Wicker adds that
several readers offered blends of he, she, and it.
heesh, hiser(s), herm, hermself Leonora A. Timm, "Not
Mere Tongue in Cheek: The Case for a Common Gender
Pronoun in English," International Journal of
Women's Studies 1: 555-65.
1979 one Lillian E. Carleton, "An Epicene Suggestion,"
American Speech 54: 156-57.
et, ets, etself Aline Hoffman of Sarnia, Ontario;
cited by William Sherk, Brave New Words (Toronto:
Doubleday Canada, 1979).
hir, hires, hirem, hirself Jerome Ch'en, Professor of
History at York University, New York Times, 6
January, 18.
shey, sheir, sheirs; hey, heir, heirs Paul Encimer
favors the first over the second paradigm. The
Peacemaker 32 (February): 2-3.
1980 it Herman Arthur, "To Err Is Huperson; to Forgive,
Divine," American Educator 4 (Winter): 30-32.
1981 heshe, hes, hem Ronald C. Corbyn, "Getting Around
Sexist Pronouns," Anthropology Newsletter 22
(October): 10-11.
1982 shey, shem, sheir Mauritz Johnson; cited by William
Safire, What's the Good Word? (N.Y.: Times Books),
30.
E, Ir Subject and possessive forms, created by the
Broward County, Florida, public schools; cited by
Paul Dickson in Words (N. Y.: Delacorte), 113.
1984 hiser McClain B. Smith, Ann Arbor News, 20 January,
Sec. A, 6.
hes Ernie Permentier, Ms. (May): 22.
hann Steven Schaufele of the Univ. of Illinois
linguistics department takes this from Old Norse,
already the source of some English pronouns;
analogous to Finnish han. Colorless Green
Newsflashes 4 (9 November), 3.
1985 herm Jenny Cheshire traces this to the magazine
Lysistrata. "A Question of Masculine Bias,"
Today's English 1: 26.
1988 han, hans A. M. Stratford, of Norfolk, England,
creates this form to resemble other British
initials (HM, HRH, HMS, HE, HMSO), English Today
14:5-6.
e, e's (from the common letter in he and she) Eugene
Wine, of Miami-Dade Community College, also notes
that I and you "have already been reduced to a
single vowel sound." Chronicle of Higher
Education, 21 September, 2.
1989 ala, alum, alis Michael Knab, of Goodwin, Knab and
Co., Chicago, derives these from Lat. al, `other'
and feels they resemble the Hawaiian sex-neutral
pronouns oia, ia. Press release and personal
communication.
e, e's, emself, em Victor J. Stone, Professor of Law
at the University of Illinois at Urbana. In the
Chicago Bar Association's CBA Record 3
(July/August): 12.
1991 de/deis; den/din Richard Strand, Keith Roberson, Dan
Fisher, BLAST (Computer) Support Office, Dept. of
Mechanical Englineering, Univ. of Illinois.
de/deis (rhymes with `dee/dyes') created de novo
with some Germanic influence; den/din created on a
similar `root' to replace man/woman and men/women.
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Linguist List: Vol-3-282.