![]() Meanwhile, commentators have forecast the demise of language once again. In 2020, a Trevor Project survey found that one in four LGBTQ youth uses pronouns other than he/ him and she/ her, and the American Dialect Society named the singular they its word of the decade. In recent years especially, they’ve become a staple of dating apps, college campuses, and email signatures. Today’s gender-neutral English-language pronouns make space not just for two genders, but for many more, serving as a way for people who fall outside the binary of “man” and “woman” to describe themselves. An editor for Harper’s Weekly, for instance, insisted that “when ‘man’ ceases to include women we shall cease to need a language.” Some embraced the new pronouns-but many dismissed them as an unnecessary linguistic complication, and others despaired that the introduction of gender-neutral pronouns would precipitate an end to language as they knew it. ![]() But in the subsequent weeks, her proposal became a national news story, earning baffled write-ups in the Chicago Tribune and the Associated Press. Pond, who had invented them the year prior. Young was actually borrowing the pronouns from an insurance broker named Fred S. When Young used his’er in a sentence, one shouted, “Wh-what was that? We don’t quite understand what that was you said.” It was 1912, and Young’s idea drew gasps from the principals, according to newspaper reports from the time. “The English language is in need of a personal pronoun of the third person, singular number, that will indicate both sexes and will thus eliminate our present awkwardness of speech.” Instead of he or she, or his or her, Young proposed that schools adopt a version that blended the two: he’er, his’er, and him’er. “I have simply solved a need that has been long impending,” she said. ![]() O n a frigid January day, Ella Flagg Young-the first woman to serve as superintendent of the Chicago public-school system-took the stage in front of a room of school principals and announced that she had come up with a new solution to an old problem.
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