A History of English Language

A history of the english language 320
tance, and it is clear that none will. The closed class of personal pronouns is much more
resistant to additions and substitutions than the open classes of nouns and adjectives. We
have seen during the late medieval period the plural pronouns in h- (hie, hem, hir)
replaced by borrowings from Old Norse (Present-day they, them, their) and the rise of
analogical its during the Renaissance. However, most of the changes in pronouns have
simply been losses in number and case, and it would be unprecedented for a consciously
constructed pronoun to come into general use.
There is precedence, however, for the simplest solution to the problem of pronoun
agreement in gender, and that is lack of agreement in number, as in the sentence with
which we began: “Everybody should button their coat.” English, which once
distinguished between singular thou, thee, thy and plural ye, you, your in the second
person, has had plural you, your as the standard form for the past four centuries. An
extension of the plural they, their to certain singular contexts would cause no more
disruption in syntax than the change in the second person, and of course it already shows
up in informal usage, as in the sentence quoted. 51
Other nouns, adjectives, and forms of address have supplanted sexist language so
naturally that it is sometimes hard to imagine the resistance with which they originally
met. Ms is a happy replacement in many contexts for the uncertainties that often attend a
choice of Miss or Mrs., putting the female form of address on the same footing as Mr., for
which indications of marital status have always been considered irrelevant. Flight
attendant has given stewardess a dated ring, somewhat like a 1950s movie, where one
might also hear girl for woman in a way that now jars, especially if there is no question of
referring to the man as a boy. Poetess, authoress, and sculptress were out or on their way
out before the feminist writings of the 1970s, while actress has had more resilience,
possibly in part because of distinctions in awards for performance that would not apply to
poets, authors, and sculptors. Job titles ending in -man, such as chairman and
Congressman, sometimes substitute -person, though there is variation according to
personal preference. A familiar choice in recent years is the shorter form chair, a word
that the Oxford English Dictionary records with this meaning as early as 1658.
234. The Oxford English Dictionary.
In the more enlightened attitude of the Society for Pure English, as distinguished from
most purist efforts in the past, it is impossible not to see the influence of a great work that
came into being in the latter half of the nineteenth century. About 1850 the inadequacy
51
See Ann Bodine, “Androcentrism in Prescriptive Grammar: Singular ‘they’, Sex-indefinite ‘he’,
and ‘he or she,”’Language in Society, 4 (1975), 129–46.