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72 seven Pronouns One of the interesting features of simple pronouns is that their raison d’etre is aesthetic, rather than grammatical. While most sentence elements exist in order to make prose coherent or clear, simple pronouns exist so that our writing won’t be ugly. One could argue that the complex forms—relative pronouns and interrogative pronouns—serve essential functions, but the more basic kinds, like “she” and “their” and “it,” are not strictly necessary . If you wanted to, you could write, “Barbara took Barbara’s wallet out of Barbara’s purse and Barbara gave Barbara’s check to Barbara’s landlord,” and the reader would understand what you meant. But that reader would also become infuriated by the awkward repetition, which is the problem that pronouns take care of. In doing so, they don’t actually eliminate the need for repetition, since the writer is often obliged to repeat the pronoun itself, as in the amended sentence “Barbara took her wallet out of her purse and gave her check to her landlord.” But the “her” is much less obtrusive. Like other elements that get repeated often, such as articles and conjunctions, pronouns tend to be quiet little words that don’t call attention to themselves, at least compared with “Barbara” or “Seattle” or “that jerk from accounting” or whatever else they replace. The objects that pronouns replace, by the way, are called antecedents. In addition to replacing nouns, pronouns replace possessive adjectives like “Barbara’s” or “the lumberjacks’.” When they do that, with words like “her” and “their,” they’re called possessive pronouns, which is one of three pronoun forms. The other two are subjective and objective. Subjective ones, like “he” and “she” and “we,” act as the subjects of a clause, while objective pronouns, like “him” and “her” and “me,” act as direct objects or objects of a preposition. Also, you can refer to pronouns by whether they’re singular or plural. But man, is this boring. And we don’t even need to hear most of it, since pronouns are parts of speech that we grasp early in life. We make some missteps now and then, especially in terms of differentiating the objective P r o n o u ns | 73 and subjective, but for the most part we have them under control, because we use them so often. However, there are some instances of pronoun use in which our lifelong experience with them doesn’t help us. In this chapter, we’ll look at two issues concerning pronouns that involve grammatical or aesthetic complications , especially for those who write fiction. My Kingdom for a Singular Non-gendered Third-person Pronoun Chapter 17, “Betrayals of Language,” deals with the notion that sometimes the English language’s inherent limitations, rather than our own shoddiness, cause ineffective prose. We’ll look at one of the more troubling limitations here, rather than in the later chapter, because it’s a significant pronoun usage issue. Specifically, the problem is that the English language lacks an effective singular non-gendered third-person pronoun. The name alone may have already put you to sleep, but if you stay with me for a while, you’ll see that it’s a real problem, perhaps one you’ve had to wrangle with before. The need for a singular non-gendered third-person pronoun typically comes up when we invoke a theoretical person, as when we say, “A fan of opera should wonder about Bordoni’s health” or “Someone should tell Rich to shut up.” “A fan” and “someone” are theoretical beings who have the characteristics of liking opera and being obliged to silence Rich. Because these beings are individuals rather than groups (i.e., singular), and because we don’t know if they’re men or women (i.e., non-gendered), we need a singular non-gendered third-person pronoun whenever we replace them. If we want to avoid the repetition of “a fan of the opera should wonder if a fan of the opera will ever see Bordoni perform again,” it’s time to figure out what should stand in for the second “fan of the opera.” English actually does have a couple singular non-gendered third-person pronouns, one of which is “it.” But that won’t work in our examples, because when humans are being replaced, we expect the replacing pronoun to acknowledge their humanity. People can get sensitive about this. In my pre-fatherhood days, whenever I learned someone was...

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