Long before people started signing themselves with a preference for he/him, she/her or they/their, I often had trouble with pronouns. They are such little, ordinary words, it always comes as a surprise.

Not all the time, you understand. Sometimes I go for months with pronouns flowing like a clear stream. And then suddenly I’ll bump into a clump of them, all snarled up and getting in the way of the flow of – well – sense. And so far, none of it has been about gender/sex.

It happened again this week.

Confusing Pronouns

I was reading a novel by an author new to me. A critic I admire and respect (and often agree with) recommended it highly. A classic murder mystery in form, it is set in a fantasy universe of carefully co-habiting humans and other species. It’s a cracking plot, with great characteris and a couple of real surprises as the story unfolds.

But the pronoun problem arrived early, when two women met and there was a physical description of one of them. The story is told the the third person, so they were both “she”. I didn’t know which.

So I stopped and went back to previous chapters to see if there had already been a description of the one we’d already seen. There had. Not particularly strong – a lot of it was about clothes and expression, rather than physical characteristics – but enough to tell which woman was which, I just hadn’t clocked the first one.

I ticked myself off for being an inattentive reader.

A Fashion for Pronouns?

Image by Mircea Iancu from Pixabay

Only then it got worse. More and more I found I didn’t know which of two (usually female) characters the author meant. I did an awful lot of flipping back, just to check. It was frustrating. It is a tribute to everything else about the book that I finished it and found the story satisfying.

But afterwards I felt a bit ruffled. I mean why put unnecessary obstacles in a reader’s way?

In every case, the simple use of the character’s name would have made all clear. What had the author got against names? And why didn’t the editor or copy editor pick up that it was confusing?

I posited that maybe the book had originally been written in the first person and then changed. I’ve done that myself, and it’s an absolute pig.

And then I thought, maybe it was a deliberate style choice, as it was for Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall. Her editor, Nicholas Pearson, has written that his reaction to the first forty pages was “as a reader one felt embedded somewhere in the back of Cromwell’s skull.”

Hmm. Not this reader. It was the main one of several reasons that I failed to finish that book or start its sequels, though I had read and admired Hilary Mantel’s previous work. I need to be certain who the author is talking about. If there are two candidates for “he” it fusses me. So maybe I’m particularly pronoun-sensitive.

Use of Pronoun: Some Conventions

px-media – stock.adobe.com

I looked for a nice, straightforward guide on using pronouns to link to from this blog. But everything I clicked on was all about acknowledging someone’s gender identity. (See below.) Indeed one such website is as much about courtesy and consideration (good) as it is about clarity (not so good). It has so many options that my eyeballs began to bubble. You may find it helpful.

So maybe the conventions I learned at school are outdated and don’t matter any more. I find them helpful, though. In case you do too, here is a quick guide to the basics that the author and editors above ignored.

The conventions I learned at school…

• A pronoun is a small, everyday word that you hear all the time, which stands for something or someone else which has already been named, or otherwise identified. I ≥ me; you; he/she/it ≥ him/her/it; we ≥ us; you; they ≥ them. [≥ shows the form when the pronoun is the object of the verb e.g. I love him. He loves me.
• Because they are so common, pronouns are also very flexible. They can refer to anyone or anything. In a piece of writing, the same pronoun will refer to many different things. (Grammarians call the thing or person referred to the Antecedent.)
• It is generally accepted that a personal pronoun will refer to the person most recently named or otherwise identified. e.g. Sandy swung round. She hadn’t heard the door open.
• Once you have established that Sandy is she, that remains consistent until you name another female e.g. Sandy swung round. She hadn’t heard the door open. Ellen came in and put her backpack on the table. NB This is Ellen’s backpack, because she’s been named. If it were Sandy’s backpack, we’d have to write …and  put Sandy’s backpack on the table.
• If it were a man who came in, named or not, then it would be Sandy’s backpack.
• If it were “the girl” who came in, then it would theoretically be “the girl’s” backpack, because she has been identified, if not named. The context may make it clear. But that’s one where I’d definitely stop and think about what the reader will think.
• But if it were “a girl” if would definitely be ambiguous and we’d have to make it “Sandy’s backpack” .

Sex or Gender and Pronoun Confusion

I am told the Blessed Fowler thought that gender was entirely a grammatical construct. These days the terms are used, at least by some, interchangeably.

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

My Oxford English Dictionary. considerably more modern than Fowler, gives the grammatical definition only second place. Its first definition of “gender” is: “either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones. The term is also used more broadly to denote a range of identities that do not correspond to established ideas of male and female: a condition that affects people of both genders | someone of the opposite gender | everyone always asks which gender I identify as.”

Image by mrkaushikkashish from Pixabay

Thus the pronoun, normally a bit of a workhorse to indicate this person or that and uncontested ownership, starts to carry also sorts of socio-political and, indeed, personal baggage.

“They/their” has stepped up to the plate. People who want to be considered as being of any possible gender or none have given it their approval. But it is, as pronouns tend to be, a quick indicator, not a precise definition.

Indeed, “they” has a fairly honourable history of use when discussing a person or persons unknown. “They must to be better than this chap,” we say of a CEO, before a shortlist has been announced.

But historically and in current practice, “they” generally indicates more than one. This is confusing. (see below)

Everina Maxwell found an elegant solution in her (fabulous) queer romantic science fiction duo Ocean’s Echo and Winter’s Orbit by creating new pronouns for her characters of non binary gender variants. They were blessedly clear and I got used to them really quickly.

They/Them/Their and Number Trouble

The real problem for the writer is when the character identifying as “they” is one among many. Sometimes context will help. But the writer will often have to reconfigure sentences to make what is happening clear.

Consider Geoffrey (he/him), Kim (they/them):

• The group had gathered in the garden and the champagne was flowing when Geoffrey and Kim arrived late. “It’s his fault,” they said, laughing. As it stands, this is ambiguous. Kim could be excusing their lateness or, (if, say Kim is a new significant other for Geoffrey) various members of the group can be comforting Kim that his lateness is not their fault.
• We now have 3 characters: Anne (she/her), Geoffrey (he/him), Kim (they/them). Anne, Geoffrey and Kim went into the kitchen. They sat down at the table. How many people sat down?
• Then Anne says something crass. Their distress was obvious. Kim’s distress? Kim and Geoffrey, both? Or all three, if Anne was clumsy rather than malicious? Editorial pen to the rescue!

The Local Use Pronoun

I suspect this is really an aspect of dialect. Of course, there are wider conventions, like calling a boat, ship, aeroplane or even car “she”. Though I think it is only their lovers and specialists who use the gendered pronoun consistently.

But I recall the elders of my grandmother’s Suffolk family insisting that the sea and the local river were also “she”. It was only confusing when they were talking about a female person at the same time, especially when they didn’t have their teeth in, and switched freely between subjects.

But the pronoun that did confuse me, for the entire length of a holiday, came from further north. I was staying with friends on the Northumberland coast and we often visited an old friend of their mother’s. She clearly lived alone very happily. And yet when she was talking about things people had brought her, she always said “us.”

Did she, I wondered, have an imaginary friend? Or a welcome visitor from the Other Side? She was robustly down to earth but the village was said to have ghosts. I began to weave a story about someone with a constant unseen companion…

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

The answer, of course, was quite different and a recent clip from the Graham Norton Show that I fell over on Facebook reminded me of it.

Actor Tom Hanks has an excellent  habit of sending a typewriter to fans who write to him, presumably advice on writing for the movies. The Norton team had found one recipient, a charming girl from Newscastle, who had used it well and wanted to say thank you. Beaming, she said from the heart, “It was the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for us.”

Ah yes, the plural pronoun for the individual self. Marvellous. It was a great story while it lasted, though.

Sophie