Pronouns are Annoying

post by ymeskhout · 2024-09-18T13:30:04.620Z · LW · GW · 12 comments

This is a link post for https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/pronouns-are-annoying

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This post isn’t totally about the culture war topic du jour. Not at first.

As with any other topic that soaks up angst like an ultra-absorbent sponge, I wonder how many have lost track of how we arrived here. Why are pronouns? Pronouns have always been meant to serve as a shortcut substitute reference for other nouns, and the efficiency they provide is starkly demonstrated through their boycott:

Abdulrahmanmustafa went to the store because Abdulrahmanmustafa wanted to buy groceries for Abdulrahmanmustafa’s dinner. When Abdulrahmanmustafa arrived, Abdulrahmanmustafa realized that Abdulrahmanmustafa had forgotten Abdulrahmanmustafa’s wallet, so Abdulrahmanmustafa had to return to Abdulrahmanmustafa’s house to get Abdulrahmanmustafa’s wallet.

So that’s definitely a mouthful, and using he/his in place of Abdulrahmanmustafa helps lubricate. Again, pronouns are nothing more than a shortcut referent. Zoom out a bit and consider all the other communication shortcuts we regularly use. We could say National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or we can take the first letter of each word and just concatenate it into NASA instead. We could append ‘dollars’ after a number, or we could just use $ instead.

The tradeoff with all of these shortcuts is precision. Depending on the context, NASA, for example, might also refer to the National Association of Students of Architecture in India, or some mountain in Sweden. Dollar signs typically refer to American dollars, but they’re also used to denote several other currency denominations. The same risk applies to pronouns. It’s not a problem when we’re dealing with only one subject, but notice what happens when we introduce another dude to the pile:

John told Mark that he should administer the medication immediately because he was in critical condition, but he refused.

Wait, who is in critical condition? Which one refused? Who’s supposed to be administering the meds? And administer to whom? Impossible to answer without additional context.

One way to deal with ambiguous referents is to just increase the number of possible referents. Abbreviations could have a higher level of fidelity if they took the first two letters of every word instead of just one, then no one would risk confusing NaAeSpAd with NaAsStAr. For full fidelity, abbreviations should use every letter of every word but then…obviously there’s an inherent tension between efficiency and accuracy with using any communication shortcut.

Same thing for pronouns. You need just enough of them to distinguish subjects, but not so much that they lose their intuitive meaning. When cops are interviewing witnesses about a suspect, they’ll glom onto easily observable and distinguishing physical traits. Was the suspect a man or a woman? White or black? Tall or short? Etc. Personal pronouns follow a similar template by cleaving ambiguity along well-understood axes, breaking down the population of potential subjects into distinct, intuitive segments. Pronouns can distinguish singular versus plural (I & we), between the cool and the uncool (me & you), and of course masculine versus feminine (he & she).

Much like double-checking a count to reduce the risk of error, pronouns carve language into rough divisions. The classic he/she cleave splits half the population in one step, significantly reducing the risk of confusion. Consider the repurposed example:

John told Maria that she should administer the medication immediately because he was in critical condition, but she refused.

A pronoun repertoire cannot eliminate all ambiguity, but ideally it narrows it enough for any remaining uncertainty to be manageable. The key lies in finding the balance: too few pronouns, and communication becomes vague and cumbersome; too many, and it gets over-complicated. It depends on the circumstances. There are scenarios where the ambiguity is never worth the efficiency gain, like in legal contracts. A properly written legal contract will never use pronouns, because no one wants to risk a protracted legal battle in the future over which he was responsible for insuring the widget shipments, just to save a few typing keystrokes.

I’m sorry if I come off as a patronizing kindergarten teacher for the above. Before jumping into any rumble arenas, I think it’s vital to emphatically establish the reason pronouns exist is for linguistic efficiency. If your pronoun use is not advancing that cause, it might be helpful to explain what it’s for.

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So, onto the red meat. I’m not a singular they Truther; it definitely exists and, contrary to some consternations, its utilization is already ubiquitous and intuitive (e.g. “If anyone calls, make sure they leave a message.”). But there’s no denying that expanding the They franchise will necessarily increase ambiguity by slurring two well-worn axes of distinction (he/she & singular/plural). By no means would this be the end of the world, but it will require some compensating efforts in other areas to maintain clarity, perhaps by relying more on proper nouns and less on pronouns.

Consistent with my aversion of ambiguity, I’ve deliberately avoided using the g-word. I recognize some people have a strident attachment to the specific gender of the pronoun others use to refer to them (and yes, using a semi-ambiguous them in this sentence is intentional and thematically fitting, but you get it).

The most charitable framework I can posit on this issue is that gendered pronouns are an aesthetic designator, and either are, or should be, untethered from any biological anchor. So while she might conjure up female, its usage is not making any affirmative declarations about the pronoun subject’s ability to conceive and carry a pregnancy. This is uncontroversially true, such as when gendered pronouns are applied to inanimate objects. No one saying “she looks beautiful” about a sports car, is talking about vehicular gender archetypes, or about sexual reproduction roles — unless they’re somehow convinced the car improves their own odds in that department.

The problem, of course, is that my framework does not explain the handwringing. Anyone who harbors such an intense attachment to specific gendered pronoun preferences clearly sees it as much more than a superficial aesthetic designator. If their insistence is driven by the desire to be validated as embodying that specific gender then it’s not a gambit that will work, for the same reasons it does not work for the sports car.

On my end, I’m just going to carry on and use whatever pronouns, but only so long as their efficiency/clarity trade-off remains worth it. As inherently intended.

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