People Invented More Than 200 Gender-Neutral Pronouns

t is a well-known truth among linguists that so long as English is changing — which it always is — there will be people who are belly-aching about it, warning that if things keep going as they are, the language will soon be on life support and, as likely as not, dead within the year. Critics feared for the future when people started using contact as a verb in the 1920s and when they embraced text-speak like OMG in the 2000s. And for centuries, they have lamented the usage of one pronoun in particular: singular they. “Depending on who’s complaining,” writes linguistics scholar Dennis Baron, author of the forthcoming book What’s Your Pronoun?: Beyond He & She, out Jan. 21, “singular they is anything from a minor sin to evidence of complete illiteracy, moral decay, even the end of civilization as we know it.” Read Full Article »