{"id":159,"date":"2003-01-06T19:02:50","date_gmt":"2003-01-07T00:02:50","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=159"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T04:00:00","slug":"gender_neutral_singular_p","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2003\/01\/06\/gender_neutral_singular_p\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender-neutral Singular Pronouns"},"content":{"rendered":"A <cite>Boston Globe<\/cite> reader <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/dailyglobe2\/005\/focus\/An_X_treme_proposal%2B.shtml\">suggests<\/a> using &ldquo;xe&rdquo; (pronounced as in Xerox) to replace he\/she. Besides already having <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wm.edu\/CAS\/modlang\/gasmit\/grammar\/pronouns\/siemean.htm\">multiple meanings in German<\/a>, all different from the one proposed, &ldquo;xe&rdquo; and its variations don&rsquo;t sound like English to me. Anyway, it doesn&rsquo;t matter because English speakers decided long ago to use &ldquo;they&rdquo; instead. I think most casual speakers use &ldquo;they&rdquo; unconsciously. The real question is when, if ever, prescriptivists will consider it correct usage. Until they do, the best solution I&rsquo;ve found is to randomly choose either &ldquo;he&rdquo; or &ldquo;she&rdquo; each time you need a pronoun. I do this by seeing whether the last digit on my menubar clock is odd or even. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eftaylor.com\/special.html\">Taylor and Wheeler<\/a> go as far as assigning subject-specific meanings (frames of reference, if I recall) to the genders of their pronouns. That&rsquo;s a bit extreme, but I think it worked rather well for them.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Boston Globe reader suggests using &ldquo;xe&rdquo; (pronounced as in Xerox) to replace he\/she. Besides already having multiple meanings in German, all different from the one proposed, &ldquo;xe&rdquo; and its variations don&rsquo;t sound like English to me. Anyway, it doesn&rsquo;t matter because English speakers decided long ago to use &ldquo;they&rdquo; instead. I think most casual [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}