Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

If you wish to read unrelievedly ungrammatical prose, try the thrillers of Eric Lustbader. Virtually every
line contains constructions that start with a capital letter and end with a full stop but which cannot by
any stretch of the imagination be considered to be sentences since they are totally innocent of verbs.
It may seem that I am becoming as boring as Robert Browning's grammarian (see The Grammarian's
Funeral wherein is described the death rites of a pedantic man who all his life long "...ground he at
grammar").
Despite that, I think that grammar is a very important part of both the written and spoken language and
without at least paying lip service to it you will always end up with the type of ugliness that the extract
from the Weiss novel typifies.
Grammar is a subject that is taught less and less frequently these days. Teachers are more concerned
with self-expression than with grammar (though how you can express yourself cogently without a
modicum of understanding of the rules of grammar escapes me). Most people simply apply casually
learned conventions to their speech and writing without bothering too much about formal rules. As long
as you don't bend things until they break (as in the Weiss extract) you will probably get away with it
most of the time. Often, therefore, grammar is a non-issue.
However I find it ironic that very fine points of grammar (and vocabulary) quickly become the subject of
heated debate when the concept of gender raises its head. The problem comes, of course, when words
such as "man" (with connotations of masculinity -- ie man as in not woman) are used in a gender
unspecific sense to denote humanity in general. Women get very upset (quite rightly in my opinion) at
seemingly being ignored in this fashion and wimpish defences about the word being used generally
rather than specifically cut no ice.
There is no doubt that gender is a biological fact. It is utter foolishness to pretend otherwise. Men and
women demonstrably exist and belong to different genders. Whether or not that gender is relevant in a
given English sentence is of course a perfectly legitimate topic for debate. (It is all too often confused
with sexuality, which has nothing whatsoever to do with it.)
I find it hard to understand how the sentences "The man is very tall. He must be over six feet." can
cause any controversy. All men are of the masculine gender and the pronoun "he" correctly refers back
to the subject of the previous sentence (a specific man). The gender of the person is correctly identified
(not the person's sexuality -- I insist that we separate the two). The gender is very relevant to the
sentences since we are referring to a specific person who ipso facto possesses gender. Thus similarly
"The woman is very tall. She must be over six feet." is also nothing but a simple statement of fact.
Problems arise when you say "The person is very tall. He must be over six feet.". Here an undoubted
bias is showing itself. What evidence do we have that the person under discussion is masculine? None at
all -- so why should a masculine pronoun be used? It would make just as much sense to say "she"
instead of "he". Strictly speaking we need a gender-neutral pronoun in the second sentence but the only
one we have that comes close is "it" and that won't work because it implies sexual neutrality (which is an
impossible state for a person to be in except in certain rare medical cases) rather than gender-neutrality
which is what we are seeking. There simply is no gender-neutral pronoun in English.
Over the years, many people have tried to invent the things. In the short story collection Dealing in
Futures, Joe Haldeman suggests "tha" instead of "he" (and "ther" and "thim" for "his" and "him"). I seem
to recall Timothy Leary suggesting "s/he" and "ti". However none of these have ever really caught on and
they all sound very artificial. ("s/he" cannot be pronounced and "ti" is a homonym for "tea" and "tee" and
sounds silly in this context.)
I don't really think we have a problem though. All our plural pronouns are gender-neutral ("they", "their"
and "them"). All that is necessary is to rephrase gender specific sentences in the plural and the gender
connotation vanishes from the pronoun. If it is not possible to rephrase the sentence in the plural
without losing the sense, then avoid the use of pronouns entirely by rephrasing or repeating the noun to
which the pronoun refers. Thus my sentence about a tall person might become: "The person is very tall;