Apocalyptic story of a pronoun
 'No one can outrun their destiny' was the tagline of the movie
Apocalypto. This epic action adventure was the first ever direction of
Hollywood bad boy Mel Gibson.
When I first read this, I felt a disturbance in the force as if
thousands of English professors suddenly cried out in horror, and then
were silenced.
'Their', as used in the English of the past, is a plural possessive
pronoun.
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Apocalypto |
Generally, it was used in sentences like "John and Clarissa stopped
by to grab their pie dish" or "The girls all grabbed for their wallets".
This contrasts with the singular possessive pronouns, 'his' and 'her'
("John saw his briefcase" and "Kathy hugged her penguin"). 'No one' is,
in fact, a grammatically singular subject, which can be counterintuitive
at first, because it refers to, well, everybody. We can check this with
a simple sentence like "No one sees the purple frog". Here, we use
'sees', the singular form, rather than "*No one see the purple frog"
So, given that the subject of the sentence (No one) is singular, then
technically, the possessive used should be singular as well. The tagline
could be changed "No one can outrun his or her destiny".
This may be more "correct", but frankly, I think this tagline is
cause for celebration.
English, along with some linguists and some dictionaries will welcome
its new gender neutral pronoun on the day it enters the mainstream
grammar.
Languages are constantly changing. When a population needs something
new from the language that they speak, they create it. Whether that
means new words, new constructions, or new usage patterns, you cannot
hold a language still.
Well, English has a new need. Due to modern political correctness, we
can no longer say "No one can outrun his destiny". Although the grammar
itself is quite indifferent to the social treatment of gender, it is
true that women are excluded from groups in speech when you use "his"
with universal statements. So, we have tabooed the 'universal his', but
we have never had a good way around it. We can use the awkward 'his or
her', but human laziness and reluctance to say more than necessary makes
this undesirable.
There have been proposals to create gender neutral pronouns such as
Spivak pronouns.
They were introduced by mathematician Michael Spivak and in he
proposes to use 'ey' for they, 'em' for them, 'eir for their, 'emselves
for themselves. However, as languages tend to do, it looks like English
has grown around the problem, and, in spoken usage, the third person
plural forms (them, they, their) seem to have sprung up to bridge the
gap, at least in this case.
Now, this suggestion will not go over well with lots of
prescriptivists (people who think that there is a correct way to speak,
and grammar is set), but change is inevitable, and the fact that this
construction could make it onto a billboard and be the tagline for a
major movie is a good indicator of this direction.
It will not happen overnight, and it will not be 'acceptable' for
some time to come.
However, it will happen. In the same way that 'whom' is gradually
fading from use, this change will fade in. As one of my favourite quotes
goes, "a grammarian trying to stop language change is like a gardener
trying to stop continental drift". |
