Guest post: The pronoun business is a trap
Originally a comment by What a Maroon at Miscellany Room.
It’s fairly common when you’re in a group of three or more to refer to one of the group in the third person. As an example, imagine a classroom discussion, where Johnson (a man who insists that others use female pronouns when referring to him in the third person) has just expressed an opinion. The teacher, in an attempt to stimulate some conversation, may then turn to Smith and say, “Do you agree with what [3rd person sg. pronoun] says?” Of course the teacher could just say “Johnson”, but it gets awkward if the question becomes more complex: “Do you agree with Johnson when Johnson says X?”
From a linguistics perspective, this is one of my main objections to the whole pronoun business. Pronouns (like most grammatical morphemes) are meant to be semantically and cognitively light, and generally are not very salient phonetically or semantically (which is why they often get reduced or in some languages elided completely). Linguistic communication is cognitively demanding; using pronouns when everyone understands who or what the referent is and, in the case of humans when speaking English, what sex the referent is, lightens the load for both the speaker and the listeners; insisting on pronouns that don’t match the referent’s sex, either in gender or in number (i.e., “they”), forces both sides of the conversation to put effort into producing and understanding what’s normally an effortless part of the discourse, and can impede communication. It’s like sleeping on a lumpy mattress–suddenly you’re noticing and being bothered by things that are supposed to fly under the radar, and you’re not getting a good night’s sleep.
Sometimes people will say it doesn’t really matter; after all, most English speakers use the same pronoun for second person singular and plural without any problems. Except of course that causes all kinds of problems, which are aggravated by the fact that we often use “you” as a generic pronoun as well. We’ve developed ways to get around the ambiguity (youse, y’all, yinz, etc.; or “Not you personally but you generically”), but the ambiguity is there, and it can defeat the purpose of the pronoun by forcing us to put our communicative and cognitive resources into clearing it up.
The pronoun business is a trap, one that we’re all bound to fall into at some point, and when we do, we’ll be forced to either grovel in apology or sew the proverbial “T” onto our garments.
I can already see the “transphobes to erase existence of trans people in order to get good night’s sleep” headline!
Aw, hell, look at me, Ma!
@Starskeptic,
I’m at the age where a “good’s night sleep” means I can go six hours without having to get up to pee.
“Transphobes easily interrupt sleep to pee on trans rights”
I can’t stop!
Maroon, I think that only a limited number of circumlocutions would be necessary in sticking to last names. In some cases, they will be cognitively lighter than the formulations you suggest. For example, instead of “Do you agree with Johnson when Johnson says X?” one could use “Do you agree with Johnson that X?” Or one could use “Johnson has proposed X. Do you agree with that?” As a bonus in the latter, you’ve swapped out the person for the statement.
I agree that the undergrads monkeying around with pronouns are imposing a cognitive tax on their professors. I still think the easiest way to avoid paying that tax may be not to use them in class.
It also runs into the fact that if I had meant that, then I would have said that. That is, vocabulary and syntax differences are significant. Suppose you were to say, “Do you happen to know where Johnson put his hat?” That’s a fairly bog standard construction. In fact, one might go so far as to say it’s normal. As such, deviation from the norm indicates that the meaning would be also so deviate. Using a name instead of a pronoun in this sentence would strongly imply that there are two people named Johnson.
*cough* relevance theory *cough*
@Papito,
Yes, the example I gave could be easily circumvented; it was just one I constructed more or less on the fly. But it’s easy enough to come up with more complicated examples, including examples where avoiding the pronoun leads to a change in meaning (see Nullius’s comment, for one). And in any case, avoiding pronouns requires effort–much of our spoken language is fairly automatic, especially with regards to basic grammatical morphemes like pronouns, and so avoiding them requires thinking about language in a way that doesn’t come naturally. It is a cognitive tax.
Using pronouns is supposed to make communication easier. Using preferred pronouns makes communication harder, more laborious, and strewn with grammatical and cultural sensitivity landmines.
Arcadia: And that’s without even beginning to talk about neopronouns, which amount to names with grammatical cases.
@Nullius,
Indeed. I didn’t mention those in my rant because it was already getting too long, but also because they seem to be a lot less prevalent these days. But that could be just because of the circles I travel (and surf) in.
Maroon, I was about to suggest that the way you teach class must be very different from the way I do, because I always referred to students by their last names already, but I remembered a few things.
First off, I stopped teaching college before the gender nonsense blew up, so I never really had to deal with it. Second, though we are talking here in English, I mostly taught in Spanish, and I hadn’t even considered the adjective problem. That would really leave me gagueando. “¿Usted está de acuerdo con Johnson, cuando dice X?” could easily become “¿Está correct…a, o, uh… con razón Johnson aquí?” Yeah, that would joder todo, not to mention the cognitive tax on the students.
Papito,
La verdad es que hace mucho que no doy clases, pero cuando era profesor, era profesor de ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages). (Aside from a few Spanish courses I taught.)
And yeah, a language like Spanish is even more of a mess. I know that at least some have advocated replacing -a and -o endings with -e, which at least has the advantage over -x of following Spanish phonotactics (I cringe every time I hear or see “Latinx”), but it’s really not much of a solution, and I don’t think it’s catching on.
But anyway, the tax isn’t just on the teachers/professors, it’s on everyone. Anyone in the classroom has to worry about “misgendering” someone every time they speak, even if they don’t buy into the ideology, and there can be a blowup at any moment.
And it’s not just in the classroom, it’s everywhere.