English carries a secret burden of gender. We traditionally refer to a ship as “she”—perhaps not so much now, in the abstract, but as soon as we grow fond of a particular boat “it” becomes “she,” and probably has a feminine name. I might refer to my car in the feminine: She is getting old, the éclair. When I was studying the harp, my teacher, whose living room was full of concert harps—gilded, ebony, bird’s-eye maple—told me that harps, like ships, are “she”s. Can it be a coincidence that these are all feminine nouns in Italian? La nave, la macchina, l’arpa. We speak of the mother tongue (the Latin lingua and the Greek glossa are both feminine) and the mother country (but also of the fatherland). The United States is said to be a daughter of Great Britain. The feminine is just below the surface, and so is the masculine. In 1993, when Lorena Bobbitt cut off the penis of her husband, the aptly named John Wayne Bobbitt, a famous writer who shall go nameless was assigned to cover her trial for The New Yorker. His piece (which never ran) circulated around the office in samizdat. In the passage that described what Lorena Bobbitt did, on leaving the house, when she realized that she still had her husband’s penis clutched in her hand, the author wrote that “she threw him into a field.” Well, of course the penis is a male appendage, but to spontaneously assign it grammatical gender seems to me proof of two things: a man’s attachment to his penis, and the fact that that attachment runs right down to his linguistic roots. They don’t call them personal pronouns for nothing.
Pronouns run deep. A friend’s father once said to her, “Don’t call your mother ‘she.’ ” My friend wondered why not—it was accurate—but to her father it sounded disrespectful: his daughter was dismissing her mother with a mere pronoun, “a poor little weak thing of only three letters,” as Mark Twain wrote of the German pronoun sie in his essay “The Awful German Language.” Or perhaps my friend’s father thought she was subtly suggesting that father and daughter were allied against the mother in a conspiracy of pronouns. But why would “she” be an insult? How can a pronoun resound in so many ways? In German, every noun as well as every article (both definite and indefinite) and adjective may change form depending on its gender as well as on its case, and there are three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and four cases (nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive). So that’s a lot to master. (Twain had the same problem I do with gender. In the same essay, he wrote, “Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.”) There are subtle distinctions in pronouns from language to language. We no longer use the familiar form of “you”—“thou,” “thee,” “thine”—while German and Italian, for example, carry on distinguishing the familiar forms (du and tu) from the formal Sie and Lei. The formal “you” is capitalized in German and Italian, while the first-person singular (ich and io) is lowercase: what does that say about how people think of themselves in relation to others in German and Italian as opposed to the way they do in English, where the convention is reversed? Actually, Italians don’t even use the pronouns if they don’t feel like it, because the verb forms have that information packed into them. Japanese does without gender entirely. Highly inflected verb forms signal the relationships between the speaker (bossy if a man, meek if a woman) and the spoken to and the spoken of. Sometimes, a Japanese person with good English still confuses “he,” “she,” and “it,” to our delight. In a 2010 documentary about John Lennon, Yoko Ono remembered giving a beautiful silk pajama (she used the singular) to John. “She fit him totally,” Yoko said.
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Our language problems with gender are not as complicated as German or as exotic as John Lennon’s silk pajama, but they are endlessly controversial. Perhaps the most intractable problem hovers around the conventional use of the masculine pronoun to include the feminine when the antecedent is mixed (he or she) or unknown or irrelevant. As the last bastion of grammatical gender in the English language, the third-person-singular personal pronouns—“he,” “she,” “him,” “her,” “his,” “hers”—these six dense and ancient words, rounded with wear into tough little nuts, have become the most ticklish subject in modern English usage.
Bryan Garner, in Garner’s Modern American Usage, sums it up under the heading “The Pronoun Problem”: “English has a number of common-sex general words, such as person, anyone, everyone, and no one, but it has no common-sex singular personal pronouns. Instead, we have he, she, and it. The traditional approach has been to use the masculine pronouns he and him to cover all people, male and female alike. That this practice has come under increasing attack has caused the most difficult problem in the realm of sexist language.” As A. A. Milne wrote, “If the English language had been properly organised . . . 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.”