“Yo” doesn’t look like a substitute for the pronouns “he” or “she” (3rd person pronoun) as much as a word for calling out to someone else energetically and loudly.

As I’ve heard it used, “yo” is an attention-grabbing version of the 2nd person pronoun, “you,” that incorporates aspects of “Hey!” It’s like “Hey, you!” in one word. It seems to have evolved from “your” and “you.”

Examples:
Yo mama don’t dance like mine.
Yo! Yo-yo, c’mere man! Hey, I’m talkin’ to yo!

Based on usage I’ve heard (I don’t live in the urban streets, so I could be wrong), the interpretation of “yo” above is incorrect.

This is based on what I’ve observed, and as many of us know, “anecdote is not the plural of data.”

One source that backs up my interpretation—perhaps not objective, but subject to some popular use–is the Urban Slang Dictionary at: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=yo

Word up, yo!

May the PLWYGYWO,
Dan

May the PLWYGYWO,
Dan

…if you truly want a gender-neutral personal pronoun when referring to a specific person who does not want a standard gender identification the same pronoun probably cannot also be used to refer to a person with a definite gender identification.

Please correct me if I misunderstand, but are you suggesting that there’s a need for one gender-neutral pronoun for people whose gender is defined outside the context of the conversation (i.e. they certainly have a gender, but the speaker/audience don’t know or care about that gender) and another pronoun for those whose gender isn’t defined in any context (i.e. those who don’t identify to a gender)?

If so, that seems to be going back to the same problem we had to start with! Now, if we’re talking about some hypothetical person eating cookies, we must limit that hypothetical to refer only to people who identify to a gender, or to only people who do not.

Or, I guess you could pick one of your two pronouns to refer, in hypothetical statements, to both categories. Except wouldn’t that cause the same problems as trying to use “he” in hypothetical contexts to mean the larger group?

Seems like the best solution is to have a personal pronoun that doesn’t reference gender at all, even to mark its absence.

I think for the reason that we don’t use “it” as our gender neutral personal pronoun. Different connotations. As has already been discussed, “they” has a natural precedent and I think mentally conjures up the notion of unknown rather than the abolition or replacement of gendered personal pronouns. One has to imagine referring to one’s mother as “they”, because I think there will be a pull between the use of gendered pronouns when they are relevant (as in the case of “mother”) and when they aren’t relevant (in the case of “doctor”), so that if you truly want a gender-neutral personal pronoun when referring to a specific person who does not want a standard gender identification the same pronoun probably cannot also be used to refer to a person with a definite gender identification. Mentally they are different concepts and I imagine that an organic transformation will not happen readily.

Clearly I could be wrong, as we have many words with multiple meanings. But from my perspective, because they signify two distinct linguistic problems, there will either have to be two solutions or one use will have to arise from the other. But not being a linguist I might be talking out of my butt.

Everybody Loves THEIR Jane Austen

Clearly if you have a problem imagining a single person from that sentence, which is isolated. But perhaps in a fuller context. A pronoun is always referring to something. If you were walking down the street and a guy jumped out in front of you and shouted “They took all the cookies for themselves!” you would naturally thing more than one person.

But in a typical context you might encounter that sentence, I think “they” works well because the plural implies possibility rather than specificity: “Where did all the cookies go?” “Someone must have taken them.” “And they took all the cookies for themselves! How selfish!”

To me, the plural works nicely; in fact I would say to me it sounds correct. While technically referring to “someone” which is singular, the realm of possibilities of who that ’someone’ is naturally (again to me) falls into the plural.

But there seem to be two different reasons why we would want a gender neutral pronoun. One is when the pronoun refers to a specific human whose sex is unknown to the speaker, but is definitively sexed. The second is from trans activists or those who challenge the notion of gender/sex, etc. I think they are different issues and I’m not certain that they could be resolved with a single word.

A gender neutral pronoun in the former situation acts as a placeholder and can coexist with gendered pronouns. When the speaker discovers the gender of the person in question, that speaker (this would be a good place for that gender neutral pronoun) could then revert to a gendered pronoun. “I went to the doctor today.” “What did s/he say?” “She said there is nothing to worry about.” “Well did she tell you what you can do?”

But the latter situation is quite different. The gender neutral pronoun in that case would either replace gendered pronouns altogether or would be referring to a person who is of neutral gender. So if it were meant to coexist with gendered pronouns, it would serve as both a gendered placeholder and as an “it” that implies a person rather than a thing. It might be very difficult for something like that to arise organically.

Obviously, someone had a problem with it then.

Unless of course you meant no one IMPORTANT had a problem with it. Meaning men.

Yes, you did. Ever since Olde Englishe, “he” was understood to include the feminine when gender is unknown or not significant. And “man” was understood to include both genders—as it still does in German. Unfortunately, English lost the word for a specifically male human being a few hundred years ago: “wer.” (It survives today only as “werewolf” and a couple of other compounds.)

Why don’t we just adopt, say, the Cantonese 3d-person pronoun, which has neither gender nor number. Or Loglan, which has 5 of them, so you can refer to multiple different 3d persons separately.

The gender-neutral, 3rd-person pronoun that had been used for centuries in the past was “he.” And until feminists in a America spoke up about it, no one had a problem.

Yeah, us eeee-v-v-vil feminazis ruined it for everyone. How dare we ask people actually *think* about the language that we use? Pfffft.

Maybe I’m just hanging out with all the people speaking Japanese and not speaking street.

I’m going to stick with inventrix here. Since “inventor” is, I’m pretty sure, from the latin, we should stick with latin suffixes.

The proper term is “lady doctor”, as you would know if you hung around curmudgeonly old men more often.

what is the feminine form of “research fellow”?

“Researchess fellow”. Duh.

(Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if “fellow” meaning “man” derived from “fellow” meaning “comrade”, not the other way around. So I would consider “fellow” to be technically gender-neutral, but seeing as how the first meaning is the only one used outside of academia, perhaps that distinction is, uh, academic.)

Inventress or inventrix? And why don’t we have doctresses? And until you saw it written down, did you even know that there was a word “comedienne”?

Actually, that’s why I wish we could ditch the feminine suffixes for professions - they’re so inconsistent, and in many cases nobody knows they exist. If simply reapplying the masculine form is good enough for things like “doctor”, why not everything else? I think that, besides the common ones in fields that have traditionally included women (stewardess, waitress - sad that I can only think of servile roles, eh?), most of them are unknown except for clever writers who want a nifty ten-dollar-word.

Here’s a trick for you: what is the feminine form of “research fellow”?

I can say “Jane, the inventor of the cancer vaccine, is a credit to mankind”, and that’s obviously just short for “humankind”, regardless of Jane’s gender.

Well, if we’re going to get stuffy about it, isn’t Jane more likely an inventrix than an inventor?

I’m against gender essentialism, but I’m required by the conventions of my language to constantly be bringing up the gender of everyone around me, and everyone I refer to, in contexts where their gender isn’t relevant. From my perspective, that’s the vast majority of contexts. Plus, English pronouns as they are now create difficulties around people who don’t want a standard gender identification.

So, that’s why I’m happy to see things such the expanded use of “they” and “them”. Eventually, maybe I’ll have enough guts to actually start using it in place of gender-specific pronouns in my everyday communication. At the very least, it’ll probably spark some interesting conversations.