Hitting the Glass Ceiling of Grammar

"A frustrated student sits at his desk..."

Wait, maybe the student we're talking about is not male.

"A frustrated student sits at her desk..."

Neither is the student necessarily female.

"A frustrated student sits at its desk..."

Nor is the student a dog.

"A frustrated student sits at their desk..."

The pronoun should at least agree with the subject, for Chrissake...

"Frustrated students sit at their desks..."

Wait a minute, how many students are writing this paper, anyway?

Once upon a time, women weren't allowed in Lamont and Neil Armstrong could take a step for Man and leap for Mankind without fretting too much over whether his statement was gender-neutral. In those days, a student sat at his desk to write his paper on the history of mankind. A few weeks after he handed in the paper, this student's professor said to his class, "If anyone wants to, he can pick up his paper after the lecture." The student received his paper, was satisfied with a Gentleman's "C" and went to a Final Club to get drunk and meet a bunch of Wellesley girls. What did "he" have to be frustrated about?

Today, we happily live in a society where most people consider "he" and "she" to be equal--as people, at least. As a pronoun, however, "she" still hits the grammatical glass ceiling while "he" runs rampant, masquerading as a "gender-unspecific pronoun" that represents both men and women. But the supposition that "he" or "his" may refer to both sexes is ludicrous, since study after study has shown that people of both sexes take this pronoun to refer exclusively to a male. The elusive "gender unspecific pronoun" represents a gap between the rules of grammar and the rules of society that students and academics constantly face. Any student who has written a paper in college has found himself--I mean, herself--I mean, themselves--oh, forget it; I'm moving on to the next paragraph.

As Gordon Harvey, the assistant director of Expository Writing, points out, "The 'he' construction nowadays...suddenly calls attention to the writing and the writer. Unfortunately, many of the proposed alternative constructions...also stick out." For example, writers commit stylistic suicide if they repeatedly use the clunky "he or she" ("If anyone wants to, he or she can pick up his or her paper after lecture") or the dull, formal "one" ("If anyone wants to, one can pick up one's paper...").

Linguists have offered other solutions. The most common alternative--which has become acceptable in everyday speech despite its grammatical incorrectness--is to follow the gender-unspecific subject with the plural "they" ("If anyone wants to, they can pick up their paper..."). This construction may not sound too bad when spoken, but it doesn't look too good on paper. Another possibility is the hybrid "s/he." However, whereas "they" seems awkward on paper, "s/he" is awfully hard to pronounce in everyday speech. A few years ago, Expos instructor Nathaniel Lewis came up with a novel solution to the pronoun problem when he and his students invented the pronoun "e" to substitute for its inadequate pronominal brethren.

But none of the proposed solutions seems adequate, and a writer who chooses to confront the problem at all (I'll pass, thanks) may find that "he" and "his" are still the best. The problem stems from the fact that language, though evolving, remains in many ways stubborn and resistant to change. Linguists divide language's parts of speech into two classes: open and closed. Words in the open class are more flexible. Open nouns can adapt quite fluidly as culture changes, so that "Negro" shifts to "colored," then "black" and "African-American." Pronouns, however, belong to the closed class of words; they are the building blocks of language and hence are more difficult to alter.

True, pronouns like "thee" and "thou" have basically disappeared from common usage. But as Associate Professor of Linguistics Bert Vaux says, "Language has a mind of its own...Changes can not be willed by people; they almost always arise unconsciously." In other words, those who might wish to introduce the pronoun "e" into common usage would almost certainly fail, just as feminists who have endorsed the new spelling of "womyn" have met with linguistic resistance.

Speaking of womyn, I have not forgotten another option: using "she" and "her" exclusively for all gender-unspecific pronouns. This construction sticks out just as much as, if not more than, the repeated use of "he." But that may be the point. People should call attention to the fact that English is sexist. The language provides dozens of negative words for a sexually active female (slut, ho, harlot) and not one for a male (stud?). It refers to groups as "you guys" when no men are present. It calls someone who presides and perfects a "master," while a "mistress" wallows in feminine immorality.

Of course, language doesn't call women "sluts"; people do. Changing language can only succeed insofar as we change the attitudes of those who speak it. Otherwise, people will consider linguistic alterations a laughable outgrowth of political correctness, forced upon them by an overly sensitive establishment. Society will remain just as frustrated if political correctness leads only to the switching of a few pronouns, and not to thinking deeply about the real nature of gender and gender equality.

Marshall I. Lewy '99-'00 is a history and literature concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.