"Among the New Words"

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Ben Zimmer, Jane Solomon, and Charles Carson, "Among The New Words", American Speech May 2016:

In this installment we continue our consideration of items nominated at the American Dialect Society’s 2015 Word of the Year proceedings […]

The overall winner is considered here: they used as a singular third-person pronoun, a gender-neutral (or “epicene”) alternative to the binary of he and she. One might object that there is nothing particularly new about singular they, as the Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.) includes examples
back to the fourteenth century […]

What is genuinely new, however, is the use of they to refer to a known person in order to transcend the binary of he and she in the construction of a “non-binary” gender identity, such as transgender, gender-fluid, genderqueer, or agender.

"Among The New Words", which has become primarily a discussion of the ADS's Word Of The Year awards, has a history going back at least to Dwight Bolinger's contribution of the same name in April of 1941. Bolinger discussed the spread of the combining forms -worthy (reporting as new newsworthy, credit worthy etc.) and -er (reporting new forms such as first termer and Dust-bowler), before listing then-new coinages (?) such as appeasement and appeaser, blacktop, and burp.

I inserted the question mark because appeasement and appeaser have been in the OED since 1885, with citations back to the 15th and 16th centuries respectively; the OED's current entry for blacktop has citations from 1917; and burp was cited in J. Louis Kuethe, "Johns Hopkins Jargon", American Speech 1932. Which goes to show that the internet makes word-sleuthing a whole lot easier than it was in 1941.

The words in Kuethe's 1932 article are mostly familiar ones (e.g. Bronx cheer, dogs (= "feet"), fluke, half-assed, scram), but there are some that I wouldn't have recognized, such as

caflugalty—difficulty.
gazabo—a fellow.
hell-a-mile—use varies. Yes; no; indeed; what!; etc.
joed—tired; exhausted
scrag—a professor.
scrowsy—no good; mean; contemptible.
Uncle Dudley—used to designate the person speaking.



18 Comments

  1. Yerushalmi said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 5:05 am

    Okay, I'm going to have to start using "hell-a-mile" now.

    [(myl) Uncle Dudley may do so as well.]

  2. JJM said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 7:28 am

    "What is genuinely new, however, is the use of they to refer to a known person in order to transcend the binary of he and she in the construction of a 'non-binary' gender identity, such as transgender, gender-fluid, genderqueer, or agender."

    Yes, but who is using it?

    And how common is the usage?

    My sense is that this usage won't take because it is linguistically counter-intuitive.

    [(myl) Many American colleges and universities now invite their students to choose among a set of pronouns, including they, at the time of registration. See e.g. here, also here.

    And George Fox in 1660 was certain that singular you is a violation of the laws of God and arithmetic:

    For plural and singular was the language of God, and Christ, and all good men, and of the prophets and apostles; but the confused world, that lies in confusion, cannot endure it, who live not in the fear of God, neither follow the example of good men, but are in the double tongue, quenching the spirit, and hating the light of Christ Jesus, which is single. And so all Friends, train up your children in the same singular and plural language ; all masters, mistresses, and dames, or whatsoever ye are called, that do take Friends' children, that are in the singular and plural language, it is not fit for you to bring them out of it, neither to force nor command them otherwise, to please your customers, nor to please men; for if they should pay two or three for one, that would displease you, who would have them to speak two or three, when they should speak singular, thee and thou to one.

    And we can see how that turned out.]

  3. languagehat said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 8:07 am

    "Caflugalty" is clearly a variation on "defugalty." And I too am suddenly fond of "hell-a-mile."

    [(myl) DARE has an entry for caflugelty:

    Also caflugalty
    [Prob var of Scots carfuffle, carfuchle disagreement, quarrel (SND carfuffle n 2), perh blended with Scots curfuggle mess, disorder. Cf also diffucalty, ker-]

    ]

  4. J.W. Brewer said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 9:08 am

    There's a song recorded circa 1984 by the Verlaines titled "Joed Out." I never figured out what the title meant, but assumed it was probably a Kiwi-ism. (The Verlaines were one of several world-class rock bands to come of out of the initially-obscure scene that floruit back then in the remote environs of Dunedin, N.Z.) But "tired, exhausted" (esp.. if extended in scope from physical exhaustion to include emotional exhaustion) is a quite plausible meaning in context, so maybe at least one of 1932's AmEng "new words" was still current on the South Island a half-century later.

    Separately, I failed to initially parse "agender" correctly as a-gender. It first seemed like an eye-dialect version of "agenda" as pronounced by someone with the sort of stereotypically old-Bostonian accent that has "idear" for idea and "Cuber" for Cuba.

  5. Guy said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 9:17 am

    @JJM

    The situations where most people use "they" to refer to an individual are pretty numerous and (apparently) becoming more so over time. More significantly, the exact line of where it's normal is blurry and ill-defined, and ripe for expansion. But most significantly, current circumstances (not just attempting to reject the gender binary, but also things like anonymous internet communication) create a larger number of contexts where there is a felt need for a singular gender neutral pronoun, and if "they" – the gender neutral singular pronoun that English has come equipped with – isn't going to fill that role, it's difficult to imagine that some unnatural coinage like "ze" is going to gain currency.

  6. Ellen K said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 9:28 am

    My sense is that this usage won't take because it is linguistically counter-intuitive.

    Just because it's counter-intuitive now, for some, does not mean it always is and always will be for everyone. Saying it's counter-intuitive is simply saying it's not part of one's personal grammar. It's no more illogical than the old well established use of singular they. And to many people it feels more natural to use "they" for an individual of unknown or non-binary gender than to have to pick a gendered pronoun.

  7. Coby Lubliner said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 9:30 am

    J.W. Brewer: Do "old Bostonians" really say "idear" for "idea", or is it just a linking r as used in other non-rhotic speech forms, as was the case with JFK's "Cuber"?

  8. R. Fenwick said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 9:34 am

    @JJM:
    Yes, but who is using it?

    Me, for one. I personally know two people who identify as non-binary and "they/them/their/theirs" are the pronouns I use for both of them.

    The rarity of the usage is directly connected to a general lack of societal knowledge that the phenomenon of non-binary gender identification even exists. In general, the usage of epicene they is becoming more and more prevalent as societal understanding and acceptance of those identities progresses.

    My sense is that this usage won't take because it is linguistically counter-intuitive.

    In what way do you claim it is so? The second-person plural pronoun "you" has already taken over the second-person singular "thou" so universally that the latter is now virtually extinct (some religious communities notwithstanding). What is it that should prevent the third-person plural "they" from expanding to include the empty space for the epicene third-person singular?

  9. Stan Carey said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 9:39 am

    Yes, but who is using it? And how common is the usage?

    @JJM: I see it quite regularly on social media. Those who use it often specify it in their profiles, increasing its visibility.

  10. Mr Punch said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 10:02 am

    I'm aware of "Uncle Dudley" meaning the speaker only in the old expression "take it from your Uncle Dudley." Until the mid-1960s, I believe, editorials in the Boston Globe were signed "Uncle Dudley."

  11. J.W. Brewer said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 10:24 am

    Coby L.: I have heard "idear" with my own eauhs, but it may well have been a linking r in context. Here, I just visually misparsed "agender" as agend-X rather than X-gender.

  12. Peter S. said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 11:17 am

    I think I've heard *idear* at the end of sentences from New England speakers, although not before consonants. If this is a real linguistic phenomenon, it would be worth investigating. But maybe it was just my ears playing tricks on me.

  13. cameron said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 11:27 am

    I've heard of hell-a-mile only in the context of "patch hell a mile". As in constructions like "enough X to patch hell a mile" – meaning an awful lot of X.

  14. Jerry Friedman said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 12:33 pm

    I trust it's permissible to cite

    Hey, hey, Uncle Dud,
    It's a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi mud.

  15. David Scott Marley said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 2:35 pm

    As an editor, I can report that "they" used of a known individual — even one whose gender is known to be one of the traditional, grammatically recognized two — is on the rise. I see it more and more in what I edit, and I hear it more and more in casual conversion.

    I think I'm mostly seeing and hearing it in cases where the person is not identified by his or her personal name. I'm editing a book right now about the author's experiences in the U.S. Navy in the 1960s. It's a given that everybody on the ship is male, yet the author sometimes writes something like "I asked a sailor in the engine room, and they told me that …."

    Or I'll hear someone say something like "That boy's mother just called to say they'll be late picking them up."

  16. Daniel Barkalow said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 2:50 pm

    I've been seeing increasing use of they as the inoffensive pronoun to use for someone whose preferred pronoun hasn't been established, such that it's what you get at least part of the time, unless you actually introduce yourself by saying, "I'm Daniel, and I prefer he."

  17. languagehat said,

    June 30, 2016 @ 3:00 pm

    As an editor, I can report that "they" used of a known individual — even one whose gender is known to be one of the traditional, grammatically recognized two — is on the rise. I see it more and more in what I edit, and I hear it more and more in casual conversion.

    This is excellent news — not just that you see and hear it more, but that you're not opposing it! As a fellow editor, I approve of it and encourage its use, but I've been afraid that the more stick-in-the-mud of my colleagues are stubbornly editing it out, and I'm glad to know of at least one exception.

  18. Chas Belov said,

    July 2, 2016 @ 8:57 pm

    @JJM: I use singular they to refer to known individuals fairly regularly:

    1) For anyone I see as genderqueer for whom I don't know their preferred gender pronoun
    2) If I'm not referring to them by name, where the gender of the person I'm talking about is irrelevant to the situation I'm talking about

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