Ron’s Blog

Yo

I was at a social gathering last night where it seems I was they only one who’d caught a whiff of the “Is ‘yo’ the the gender-neutral pronoun?” talk that’s swirling around in popular linguistics, so I point to the issue at Language Log here: Yo. (Oh, come on; it was a room of literate and geeky people — somebody else might have heard about it.)

As I’ve noted before (in the “Ron’s Recently Viewed and Commented News and Links” list to the right), I think we already have a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun in American English: it’s “they”. We always use it in actual speech when we don’t know the gender of the person already: “Somebody drove my car, and they left the mirrors all screwed up.”