Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – He & Hi

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He

That guy.  Before the 1970s, ‘he’ could also be used in place of ‘That person’.  There’s a chance Thomas Jefferson meant “All humans are created equal” when he wrote “All men are created equal.”  But talking about both genders when only referencing one is, at best, confusing, and at worst, dismissive of over half the world’s population.  Today, using ‘he’, ‘him’ or ‘man’ to express gender neutral is a sure way to alienate your listeners, both male and female.  I’m happy we moved the language forward, but we’re still lugging old baggage behind us.  I still struggle to avoid the word ‘guys’ when talking about a mixed group of people.

Be thankful we don’t speak Old English, or we’d need to identifying the gender of every noun we talk about, which would tinge our sentences with gender specific modifiers.  That door?  It’s feminine.  That cat?  Masculine.  Unless you know the cat is a female, then it’s feminine.  A lot of my bilingual readers know what I’m talking about, since noun gender classification appears in one-fourth of the world languages.  Sometimes I wish I could be a high-school French or Spanish teacher, so I could see the reactions teenagers make when they first discover every noun is gender loaded, and they must learn the gender of every word.

In order to transition English to a gender neutral language, we need to be conscious of a few pronouns.  Speakers of gender loaded languages, however, who want to overcome their language’s sexist leanings, need to overhaul the way they think about almost everything.  In “How Does Our Language Make Us Think?”, Lera Boroditsky explains a study she and her team performed.  They asked Germans and Spaniards to describe qualities of an object with a different gender between the two languages.  Germans, who used the masculine form to talk about keys, were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful.” Spanish speakers were more likely to use the terms “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.”  When the gender role of the noun was switched, like with the word ‘bridge’, the opposite would happen.  Germans were more likely to use a word like “elegant”, while Spaniards were more likely to use a word like “dangerous”.

We’re lucky, by comparison.  If you don’t know what gender the person you’re speaking about is, you can always say “they (singular)”.  As in:

“Someone left a box of cassingles in the hall.  I don’t know who, but they have a thing for MC Hammer.”

A number of people (and some English teachers) will try to correct you on your bad grammar, and claim you should use ‘he or she’ instead of they (singular).  Don’t listen.  They (singular) has been around for centuries.  Shakespeare commonly used it.  Most grammarians and all dictionaries accept it.  The traditionalist grammarians who don’t like ‘they (singular)’ cite textbooks printed before the 1970s.  But those are the exact textbooks that tell you to say ‘he’ when speaking about a person whose gender is indeterminable.  Why give credence to that circular argument?

Before we move on, I should talk about ‘ze’ and ‘hir’, as in:

“Ze also had four remixes of Vanilla Ice’s “Go Ninja Go” in hir box of cassingles.”

These two words (which aren’t in the Scrabble dictionary) are sometimes promoted as mash-ups of gender specific pronouns.  These proto-pronouns’ strongest supporters are in the genderqueer community.  You don’t need to be gender fluid, though, to understand the obvious application of a universal gender neutral pronoun.  It’s a nice idea, but it’s taxing.  The biggest problem with ‘ze’ and ‘hir’ is that they sound so impersonal.  The two pronouns diminish people into something akin to sterile objects.  Granted, that’s my problem, not the problem of a person who prefers being referred to using ze or hir.  It sounds silly to my ears, but I’m happy to use those words to talk about you, if it makes you happy.

I’d say ze and hir won’t see common use in my lifetime… but as artificial intelligence become increasingly more human, we’ll need to find gender neutral pronouns to talk about them.  Ze and hir are excellent pronouns to talk about something too intelligent to be referred to as ‘it’, but containing a total lack of gender.  Who knows?  Maybe we’ll all be using ze and hir in ten years.

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Photo by Chris Devers

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Hi

Hey there!  Most people think of ‘Hi’ as a short version of ‘Hello’.  But ‘hi’ or ‘hy’, derived from ‘hey’ was in common use dating back to the 15th century.  Hello, meanwhile, began in the 1800s, and was used as an expression of surprise.  As in “Hello, What’s this?  A box of cassingles?”  When Telephones were new, Thomas Edison thought the surprise people expressed when taking a call was charming (“Hello!  Who’s this now?”) and advanced his opinion that it should be the official greeting over the telephone.  Hello spread with the use of the invention, probably because some of the first telephone directories included an etiquette section, which read that callers should greet one another with a welcoming “Hello!” (the book’s suggestion on how to end a phone call, “That is all,” didn’t do as well.)

By the way, if you’re looking for a word that cavemen probably uttered, it’s a good chance they yelled ‘Hey!’ or something like it.  At least it seems more likely than ‘Ooga-Booga’.  ‘Hey’ as a greeting, or as a way of getting someone’s attention, pops up in a varied assortment of languages with little communication between each other.  Wikitionary cites Burmese (hei), Finnish (hei), the Algonquin language Unami (hè), Mandarin Chinese (āi), Greek (eho), Latin (eia) and Sanskrit (he).  If “Hey!” is an aspirated yell, then “Hi!” would be its softer, friendlier counterpart.  Or, at least it’s more likely cavemen said “Hi!” to each other than “Yabba Dabba Doo!”

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Are you a logophile eager to learn more?  Why don’t you head on over to the Scrabble’s Two Letter Words Page?