In Which I Introduce a New Pronoun to English
One of the many gaping holes in the lexicon is English's lack of a pronoun to represent a gender-neutral person. We use he, his, him for males, and we use she, her, her for females, but we don't have anything for a single hypothetical gender-unknown person. For multiple such people, we use they, their, them. I've seen people just default to he in such situations, and I've also seen people awkwardly try to be politically correct and default to she occasionally. Either way, it doesn't quite work. The pronoun it doesn't really fit the bill either, since it has an implication of sexless objects. In technical writing, we tend to end-run around the problem and use second-person, so you end up doing things, instead of the hypothetical user.
Clearly, we need a new pronoun to do the job right, so here it is: Ne.
The subjective case of the pronoun is ne (prounounced "nee"), the possessive is nis ("niz"), and the objective case is nim ("nim"). Use it whenever you're speaking hypothetically about someone to whom either gender could apply. For example:
When a customer asks you to make change for a dollar, ne will usually expect four quarters. Take nis dollar and give nim dimes instead.
Didn't that just roll off the tongue? Expect this word to take off in usage and make it into Webster's any day now.
posted by jimbo @ 1:54 PM
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