While We Wait for Singular ‘They,’ How About ‘She or He’?

David Foster Wallace

The discussion around English’s lack of a gender-neutral (or epicene) singular pronoun — the blanks to be filled in a sentence like “Anyone who wants to succeed can do so if __ puts __ mind to it” — has been widely covered in Lingua Franca, most recently here. The history and outlines of the issue are by now familiar: the traditional and sexist use of he (and him and his), its replacement by the admittedly slightly clunky he or she, the sensible strategy of rewriting the sentence when possible, the hundreds of brand-new terms proposed over the last couple of centuries (shey-shem-sheir and all the others are diligently charted by the University of Illinois linguist Dennis Baron), and the inevitable solution, they-them-their, which has been making achingly slow progress on its path to universal acceptance.

Writing here a few years back, I discussed another, increasingly popular, option — the use of she or her. At the time, I noted David Foster Wallace’s use of it in a 1993 interview — “The reader walks away from real art heavier than she came to it” — and asked Lingua Franca readers if they could supply earlier examples. Someone provided a sentence from the philosopher Donald Davidson in 1992: “If you (the interpreter) do not know how a speaker is going to go on, you do not know what language she speaks, no matter how much she has said up until now.” And another commenter quoted Thomas W. Körner, Fourier Analysis, 1988: “If the reader wants to acquire facility with the Laplace transform […] she must look elsewhere.”

I infer that the usage sprang up in academic writing (with which Wallace was familiar); recently, it can be more frequently seen in mainstream or popular work. In my Lingua Franca post referred to above, I quoted the journalist Clive Thompson: ” … faced with a controversial subject about which she feels strongly, a Wikipedia contributor ought to work extra hard to describe views she finds repellent.” And she/her has been popping up more and more frequently in The New Yorker.

Thompson and some other writers alternate between she and he. As I said at the time, I find this a little distracting, “as I can’t help trying to figure out if there’s a reason why the male or female was chosen.” I don’t like the exclusive use of she much better, “especially,” as I wrote, “when used by a male writer clearly trying to get Brownie points for his right-thinkingness.” And especially not in conversation, when they is a perfect and near universally used choice, and she has the strong scent of special pleading.

They is the go-to pronoun in informal writing, as well (and in all sorts of writing in Britain). For published American prose, as it awaits the acceptance of they, I have a suggestion: she or he, or her or him, or her or his. There’s absolutely no reason that the male pronoun should go first, other than sexism and custom, neither of which is or should be the boss of how we write.

Google Books Ngram Viewer reveals that this option has been in play since the 1970s, and steadily increasing in popularity, though it still lags far behind he or she. It shows up in a lot of different contexts, including our own government’s Code of Federal Regulations, which refers to cases “when an individual is entitled to a disability benefit for a month after the month in which she or he becomes entitled to an old-age benefit which is reduced for age under §404.410. … ”

I like the sound of that. If anyone has a better solution for now, I would be pleased if she or he lets me know.