A Lexicon
of Neologisms. Mikhail Epstein
(Emory University)
Grammatical
Words (pronouns, conjunctions…)
bespite conj (blend of because and despite) -
a condensed form of the expression "because of, or perhaps in spite
of."
This
work, when done and published, will be met with keen interest by scholars and the general public alike, bespite its controversial nature.
Bespite
the intensity of the debate,
there has been considerable advancement in our understanding of this global
trend.
Bespite the expectation of Truman's impending loss,
Democrats turned out, and by means of an "underdog effect" assured
Truman's victory.
* * *
hu pron (a clipping of "human") - a 3rd person gender-neutral
pronoun referring both to a man and a woman.
Hu belongs to the category of back-clippings, in which an
element or elements are removed from the end of a word to create a shortened
form: flu
(influenza) lab(oratory),
math(ematics), ad(vertisement), piano(forte), and condo(minium). Endings with an open
syllable, as in "hu", are common in such clippings as flu, piano, condo...
Hu is pronounced (hju:), like "hu" in
"human." As a sound pattern, "hu" is closest to the
two other genderless, singular, person-related English pronouns:
"you" and the interrogative "who." "Who" and
"hu"
are naturally drawn to each other by rhyming and communicational contexts, as a
question and the answer: (hu:)? - (hju:). "Hu"
designates precisely that generic, un-gendered HUman to whom the question
"who?" refers. Thus the answer is prompted by the question itself. “Who buys this stuff? Who would want a car like that?” – "Anyone who believes that hu can afford it."
The five
forms of the 3rd person pronouns make up the
table:
nom gen
(adj) posses acc refl
---
---
---
--- ----
male he
his
his
him himself
fem she
her
hers
her herself
neut hu
hus
hus hu huself
All
derivative forms are pronounced similarly: hus (hu:z), huself (hu:self).
Anyone
who admits that hu
has a conflict of interests should not serve as an investigator.
An employee
may choose to cover only huself and
hus child or any number of
children.
It's the vice-president's job to support the president and take hus place when hu is away.
It should be the chief aim of a university professor to
exhibit huself in hus own true character - that is, as an ignorant human being, actively utilising hus small share of knowledge.
An introvert can easily become an extrovert when it is
advantageous for hu to do so.
For some
speakers, preferable technique in avoiding gender-biased pronouns is to change
the noun into plural. However, such a solution is problematic and even
detrimental to the language's ethical and conceptual capacity to deal with
individuals. Compare:
A
hero is one who places huself at risk for another.
Heroes
are those who place themselves at risk for others.
To convey
this idea I would like to imagine A HERO, a heroic human being, rather than a
group of heroes, a mass of heroes. Resorting to “they” successfully
eliminates not only gender, but individuality as well. Should we speak and
think about people only in terms of multitudes? I think it's important to talk
about a student, an employee, an author, a doctor, a physicist, or a person,
rather than to refer to faceless students, authors, doctors, persons, etc. We
need to accommodate grammar to ethical and conceptual concerns, not the other
way around. Gaining gender-neutral grammar at the expense of an individual
reference is a dubious achievement.
There are
several advantages of "hu" over other contenders for the
vacancy:
1. "Hu" is fully motivated,
semantically and etymologically
justified,
as a shortened form of "HUman."
Whenever the pronoun is
used, you
have the idea of the noun behind
it making it memorable,
inherently
meaningful and suggestive (unlike purely
conditional,
artificial pronouns earlier suggested such as "e,
et, mon,
na, ne, po, se, tey").
2."Hu"
is a short, one syllable word.
The use of
"hu" (2 keystrokes) cuts effectively the
time needed
to type "he or she" (9 keystrokes); cf. "huself" (6) and "himself or herself," (18) etc. This is a substantial economy of time,
space, and effort in our frequent
daily use of gender-neutral pronouns,
especially in e-mails.
3. "Hu" fits the pattern of existing 3rd person pronouns ("he" and "she"), first, by including the consonant "h" common to all of
them;
second, by containing only one vowel, like all of
them. "Hu - he - she" - these
words, all open syllables,
one
consonant plus one vowel, are good partners in
distributing
the gender roles within one lexical family.
4. The
spelling of "hu" coincides with its pronunciation; there
are no
irregularities of the kind that damages, for example, the
"s/he"
pronoun, making it good in writing but unpronouncable.
5.
"Hu" is used in a regular grammatical manner, in
contrast to
"they" (as a singular pronoun). "Hu" can be used routinely
and automatically, without
twisting the sentence to put all nouns in plural or exploiting
"they" in a disagreeable manner to refer to a
singular
person.
6. It is
easy to form derivatives from "hu" following the
existing
patterns: "hus" and "huself."
7. If we
decide to borrow a gender-neutral pronoun from
another
language, we'll have to consider the Persian "u,"
Arabic
"hu" and Old English "ou." All of them could be
easily
incorporated in contemporary English with the
addition or
preservation of "h," as a shortened form of the
genderless
"human".
So far, I
don't see any strong logical or historical arguments against hu-language. It is
the language of undivided HUmanness. In the near future, this HUmaness will
need even better articulation to distinguish our species from artificial
"it" forms of intelligence that are rising to a more active role in
civilization and language. Soon we'll have to answer such questions as "Who is reading,
writing, calcuLatg, speaking, and even thinking?" The answer may be "hu" (human) or "it"
(machine). We need "hu" not only to speak equally about men and women, but in order
to speak differently about humans and non-humans who share with us many
similar qualities and predicates
and fulfill many comparable tasks.
We increasingly need "hu" as a sign of a humanly specific actor or agent in the language of
mental actions and symbolic
interactions.
In a
celebrated episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," the crew of the Enterprise manages to
liberate an individual from the
hive-like structure of the maleficent Borg Collective. They name hu, of course, Hu(gh)!
PreDictionary. A Lexicon of Neologisms