Thon — The Lost Pronoun

Thons music was mawkish.

I have written about some of the reform movements associated with construction languages,[1] but of course there have been reforms offered to natural languages as well. If you’re an American, you’re using spellings from a wholly successful reform advocated by Noah Webster. Others have been less successful, such as the efforts championed by Teddy Roosevelt in the early twentieth century to make English “mor fonetik.“[2]

And there have been larger ones. There’s been a long series of attempts to bring an epicene pronoun into English, that is to say a singular pronoun that can be used for either males or females. It’s all to avoid constructions like “he or she,“ as in:

When a professor teaches a class, she or he…

It all strikes me as an awful lot of effort to save one a tiny bit of effort.

On August 28, 1884, the National Tribune of Washington, D.C. somewhat garbled a piece on a new proposal for a pronoun. I say “garbled,” because the second paragraph has been transported to the item above,[3] where it makes little sense.

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