I am a linguist who takes grammar and language use very seriously. This is one of the few times I will stand on my pet-peeve soap box.  What caused this?

<rant>

It was a blurb of text in a document on the Free Software Foundation’s site.  “…as long as the user is able to authorize the programs she wants to use…”

Back in the 1970’s, when I was in junior high school, I had a very wise English teacher who predicted the long-term influence counter-culturalism movements in the United States would have on the English language.  His point was that there was a traditional male-slant to many documents in English and other languages throughout history.  Essentially, when a person was referred to by a noun in the early part of a sentence, e.g. …

The lendee has an obligation to pay the lendor, and will be in good standing with the lendor, {insert conditional clause here}.

… it was accepted practice to further refer to the subject of the sentence (i.e. lendee) in the conditional clause with the pronoun “he”.  E.g.

The lendee has an obligation to pay the lendor, and will be in good standing with the lendor, provided he makes timely payments according to a schedule.

.. even if the person signing the contract was a she, or more than one person.  Obviously, challenging this practice was one of the things that came out of the feminist movement.  So during this time of the feminist movement, many people were experimenting with Ms. instead of Miss or Mrs.  And it was common to see the sentence above written as…

The lendee has an obligation to pay the lendor, and will be in good standing with the lendor, provided he/she makes timely payments according to a schedule.

While it seems a logical way to address the issue, try reading a document where the “he/she” pronoun is used over and over again.  It gets very annoying, very quickly.  And many of the hardline feminists were just writing “she” where “he” would have appeared before, to throw more fuel on a fire already started.

So my English teacher cautioned everyone not to take sides in the debate, and use a very simple technique which actually makes the text become neutral and elegant:  use the plural.  In all but the legalistic language I have used above, the plural will neutralize any potential offense to the reader of the text. And as for the legalese, the problem is simply solved by not using any pronoun.

Knowing this, the original phrase quoted from the Free Software Foundations site now changes to:

“…as long as the users are able to authorize the programs they want to use…”

There are some real advantages to doing this

  • You don’t have to worry about possibly offending someone with an improper choice of pronoun.
  • The plural encourages viewing the person not as a single entity, but as a collective group.  This is perfectly applicable to the text I chose as the example in this post, since it is a call to action.

</rant>

And to be fair to the Free Software Foundation whose text I chose, I really encourage everyone to read the full text of this document.  The cause is good, even if you don’t choose to sign the petition.  You can view it here.

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