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A Whimsical Etymology of a Whimsical Word

By Anatoly Liberman

Old codger is a phrase most speakers of American English still understand (in British English it has much greater currency), but cadger is either obsolete or dead.  Yet the two words are often discussed in concert.  A cadger was a traveling vendor, whose duties may have differed from that of a hawker, a peddler (the British spelling is pedlar), or a badger, but all those people were street dealers of sorts.  The OED defines cadger so: “a carrier; esp. a species of itinerant dealer who travels with a horse and cart (or formerly with a pack-horse), collecting butter, eggs, poultry, etc., from remote country farms for disposal in the town, and at the same time supplying the rural districts with small wares from the shops.”  This meaning was recorded as early as the middle of the 15^th century.  Derogatory senses like “a person prone to mooching” surfaced in books much later.  Also late is the verb cadge “beg,” believed to be a back formation from the noun (like beg from beggar).  The origin of cadger is unknown, and I have nothing to say on this subject, except for guessing that it must have been influenced by badger and citing a very old opinion, according to which in the days of falconry the man who bore the “cadge” or cage (a perch for the hawk) was called cadger. This etymology has little to recommend it.

The word that inspired the present post is codger “stingy (old) man,” “grumpy elderly man,” or simply “man” (like chap, fellow, or guy).  It appeared in books only at the very end of the 18^th century, and dictionaries say that it may be a dialectal variant of cadger.  This is possible, but, to my mind, unlikely.  Other etymologies are not even worth considering: from Engl. cottager, Engl. cogitate, German kotzen “to vomit,” Spanish, Turkish, Irish Gaelic, or (particularly silly) from the phrase coffee dodger.  I am surprised no one derived codger from kosher.  On January 18, 1890, Notes and Queries published the following letter by the OED’s editor James A.H. Murray, who was at that time working on the letter C: “Todd explains this [the word codger] as ‘contemptuously used for a miser, one who rakes together all he can’, in accordance with his own conjectural derivation from Sp[anish] coger, ‘to gather, get as he can’.  Later dictionaries all take this sense from him (Webster with wise expression of doubt), but none of them gave any evidence.  I have not heard it so used, nor does any suspicion of such a sense appear in any of the thirty quotations sent in for the word by our readers.  Has Todd’s explanation any basis?  A schoolboy to whom I have spoken seems to have heard it so used; but he may have confused it with cadger, which many take as the same.”  Todd was the editor of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary (1818).

Several people responded to Murray’s query.  The luckless schoolboy was derided for his incompetence, and almost everybody insisted that codger, unlike cadger, is a term of endearment, but one letter writer pointed out that in the fifties of the 19^th century in Derbyshire (the East Midlands) “codger or rummy codger had been constantly used when alluding to persons of peculiar and eccentric ways, as well of others of doubtful character, or of whom mistrust was felt.  A bungler of work was termed a codger, and it was the fate of every little lass who did sewing at school to cadge her work, that is, make an unsightly mess of the stitching.  A piece of bad sewing

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By Dennis Baron

The English language is full of paradoxes, like the fact that “literally” pretty much always means ‘figuratively.’ Other words mean their opposites as well–”scan” means both ‘read closely’ and ’skim.’ “Restive” originally meant ’standing still’ but now it often means ‘antsy.’ “Dust” can mean ‘to sprinkle with dust’ and ‘to remove the dust from something.’ “Oversight” means both looking closely at something and ignoring it. “Sanction” sometimes means ‘forbid,’ sometimes, ‘allow.’ And then there’s “ravel,” which means ‘ravel, or tangle’ as well as its opposite, ‘unravel,’ as when Macbeth evokes “Sleepe that knits up the rauel’d Sleeue of Care.”

No one objects to these paradoxes. But if you say “I literally jumped out of my skin,” critics will jump on your lack of literacy. Their insistence that literally can only mean, well, ‘literally,’ ignores the fact that word has meant ‘figuratively’ for centuries.

The English language is full of paradoxes, like the fact that “literally” pretty much always means “figuratively. Other words mean their opposites as well–”scan” means both ‘read closely’ and ’skim.’ “Restive” originally meant ’standing still’ but now it often means ‘antsy.’ “Dust” can mean ‘to sprinkle with dust’ and ‘to remove the dust from something.’ “Oversight” means both looking closely at something and ignoring it. “Sanction” sometimes means ‘forbid,’ sometimes, ‘allow.’ And then there’s “ravel,” which means ‘ravel, or tangle’ as well as its opposite, ‘unravel,’ as when Macbeth evokes “Sleepe that knits up the rauel’d Sleeue of Care.”

No one objects to these paradoxes. But if you say “I literally jumped out of my skin,” critics will jump on your lack of literacy. Their insistence that literally can only mean, well, ‘literally,’ ignores the fact that word has meant ‘figuratively’ for centuries.

The literal meaning of literally, which enters English around 1584 at a time when the vocabulary was really exploding, is ‘by the letters.’ The word comes from Latin littera, which means ‘letter,’ as in the letters of the alphabet, so writing something out literally meant writing it letter by letter. But by 1646 literally had developed its first extended sense, ‘word for word.’ A literal translation is one done word for word, not letter by letter. And by the 19th century Byron uses literally to mean something even more general, ‘a faithful rendering.’ His poem “Churchill’s Grave, a fact literally rendered” (1813) may be a faithful rendering of what Byron saw when he visited the poet Charles Churchill’s grave, but its use of literally is undeniably figurative. This sense of ‘faithful rendering’ is what people who insist on a literal reading of sacred texts or the constitution mean: it’s a figurative use of literal to mean ‘faithful to the original intent,’ assuming such intent can ever be determined.

Today few people use literally

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By Elizabeth Knowles

When I began working for Oxford Dictionaries over thirty years ago, it was as a library researcher for the Supplement to OED. Volume 3, O–Scz, was then in preparation, and the key part of my job was to find earlier examples of the words and phrases for which entries were being written. Armed with a degree in English (Old Norse and Old English a speciality) and a diploma in librarianship, I was one of a group of privileged people given access to the closed stacks of the Bodleian Library. For several years the morning began with an hour or so consulting the (large, leather-bound volumes of the) Bodleian catalogue, followed by descent several floors underground to track down individual titles, or explore shelves of books on particular topics. Inevitably, you ended up sitting on the floor leafing through pages, looking for that particular word. The hunt could sometimes be frustrating—occasionally you reached a point where it was clear that you had exhausted all the obvious routes, and only chance (or possibly six months’ reading) would take you further. But it was never dull, and the excitement of tracking down your quarry was only enhanced by the glimpses you had on the way of background information, or particular contexts in which a word had been used. Serendipity was never far removed.

The purpose, of course, was to supply the lexicographers working on the Supplement with the raw material on which the finished entry in its structured and polished form would be based. Not all the information you gained during the search, therefore, would appear in the finished entry, and some of the contextual information (for example, other names for the same thing at a particular period, or even the use of the word by a particular person) was not necessarily directly relevant. But that did not mean that it often wasn’t interesting and thought-provoking for the researcher.

At the time (the late 1970s) research of this kind was carried out in what we would now call hard copy. Entries in the library catalogue might lead to a three-volume eighteenth-century novel, or the yellowed pages of a nineteenth-century journal or newspaper. It followed, therefore, that someone who wanted to research words in this way needed what I had the luck to have: access to the shelves of a major library. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, all that has changed. We still (of course, and thankfully) have excellent dictionaries which can be our first port of call, and we still have library catalogues to guide us. But these resources, and many others, are now online, allowing us to sit in our own homes and carry out the kind of searches for which I had to spend several hours a day underground. With more and more early printed sources becoming digitally available, we can hope to scan the columns of early newspapers, or search the texts of long-forgotten, once popular novels and memoirs. Specialist websites offer particular guidance in areas such as regional forms of English.

The processes for searching in print and online are at once similar, and crucially different. In both cases, we need to formulate our question precisely: what exactly do we want to know? What clues do we already have? A systematic search by traditional means might be compared with climbing a ladder towards an objective—and occasionally finding that the way up is blocked. There are no further direct steps. Online searching always has the possibility that a search will bring up the key term in association with something (a name, another expression), which can start you off down another path—perhaps the equivalent to stepping across to a parallel ladder which will then take you higher.

There has never been a time at which there have been richer resources for the would-be word hunter to explore, and there are no limits to the questions that can

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By Anatoly Liberman

Introduction. In 1984, old newspapers were regularly rewritten, to conform to the political demands of the day.  With the Internet, the past is easy to alter.  In a recent post, I mentioned C. Sweet, the man who discovered the origin of the word pedigree, and added (most imprudently) that I know nothing about this person and that he was no relative of the famous Henry Sweet.  Stephen Goranson pointed out right away that in Skeat’s article devoted to the subject, C. was expanded to Charles and that Charles Sweet was Henry’s brother.  I have the article in my office, which means I, too, at one time read it and knew who C. Sweet was.  Grieved and embarrassed, I asked Lauren Appelwick, my kind OUP editor, to expunge the silly phrase.  She doctored the text, and I was left holding the bag, but grateful to my friendly correspondent and to the volatility of digital means.

Words and Phrases

Pay through the nose. Stephen Goranson also had some doubts about the explanation of this idiom that I dug up in Notes and Queries and called my attention to an earlier publication.  This time he did not catch me off guard.  I have the previous note in the same (1898) volume of NQ and two more in my archive.  A letter about the origin of pay through the nose appeared in the first issue of that once admirable periodical (1850, p. 421) and contained the following passage: “Paying through the noose gives the idea so exactly, that, as far as the etymology goes, it is explanatory enough.  But whether that reading has an historical origin may be another question.  It scarcely seems to need one.”  Mr. C.W.H., the letter writer, was too optimistic.  In October of the same year (p. 348-349), Janus Dousa took up the question and mentioned Odin and his tax.  I suggested that the idea of connecting the English idiom with Odin’s tax on the Swedes goes back to Ynglinga saga, but Dousa quotes Jacob Grimm’s book on the legal documents in Old Germanic, which means that the information on the tax became known to the English from Grimm (which makes sense: more people could and still can read German than Old Icelandic).  In 1898 (September 17, p. 231), J.H. MacMichael cited the 17^th-century phrase bored through the nose “swindled in a transaction.”  Bore did mean “cheat, gull” (the earliest citation in the OED is dated 1602; no records of pay through the nose prior to 1666 have been found).  However, the connection between bore and nose does not seem to have been steady, and pay through the nose refers to exorbitant payment rather than a fraudulent deal.  MacMichael thought that the English idiom “express[ed] payment transacted through an improper channel, as a ‘love’ child is said to come into the world through a side door.”  I understand how someone can enter through a side door, but the nose is indeed a most improper channel for paying.  The phrase needs a more concrete explanation, and I fail to detect a link between an occasional use of bored through the nose and the well-established combination pay through the nose.  The full nine yards. The origin of this phrase has often been investigated.  Numerous hypotheses exist, but none is fully convincing.

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By Mark Peters

My newest obsession is Terriers, an FX show created by Ted Griffin (who wrote Ocean’s Eleven) and Shawn Ryan (creator of The Shield, the best TV show ever). This show has deliciously Seinfeldian dialogue, effortless and charming acting, plus plots that are unpredictable and fresh. It’s even heart-wrenching at times, and I didn’t know I had a heart to wrench. This show is wonderful. Of course, no one is watching it.

One reason for the low ratings—suggested by everyone and their schnauzer—is that the title Terriers reveals nothing of what the show is actually about: a former cop and former criminal who have split the difference to become private investigators. That’s true. You won’t find any Wheaton terriers, Jack Russell terriers, or Yorkshire terriers—though a bulldog named Winston is a regular character. But terrier has been describing people as well as pooches for a long time, just like Doberman, pit bull, hound, and especially poodle. As quick as people are to anthropomorphize their dogs, we’re just as fond of poochopomorphizing ourselves. In honor of Terriers, here’s a look at words that have been transmitted from pooches to people.

As for terrier itself, it’s been used literally since the 1400’s and figuratively since the 1500’s. As the owner of a rat terrier, I can vouch for the OED’s definition: “A small, active, intelligent variety of dog, which pursues its quarry (the fox, badger, etc.) into its burrow or earth.” Believe me, if my dog were on the case, I would not want to be a rat, mouse, bunny, Smurf, or mole man. Metaphorical uses from 1622 (“Bonds and bills are but tarriers to catch fools.”) and 1779 (“Hunted…by the terriers of the law.”) show that the title of my new favorite show isn’t breaking any new ground. Terrier-osity, whether found in a dude or dog, is characterized by relentless determination that’s almost creepy: think of a Jack Russell who doesn’t seem aware there’s a world beyond his tennis ball.

As for a dog that is as well-established in language as it is horrible-reputation’d in general, you can’t beat the pit bull. Sarah Palin is synonymous with this breed, but she sure didn’t invent the comparison. A 1987 OED example involved a political hero of Palin’s: “President Reagan accused his Democratic critics in Congress Monday of practicing [sic] ‘pit bull economics’ that would ‘tear America’s future apart’ with reckless fiscal and trade policies.” Later citations mention “pit bull management” and “pit-bull intensity.” FYI, since I am a dog-lover, I have to share this article from Malcolm Gladwell on why pit bulls aren’t as deserving as demonization as you think. As with most dog problems, an idiotic owner is the key ingredient.

The word poodle has been prolific as poodles themselves, who seem to breed with anything that chases a squirrel, and maybe even squirrels themselves. There’s poodle-faker (an old term for a dandy, which feels like an old term itself), poodle parlor (a dog grooming business), and poodle skirt (an unfortunate fad in the fifties). Tony Blair was often described as George W. Bush’s poodle—that meaning of “poodle” is about a hundred years old, and it’s first found here in 1907: “The House of Lords consented… It is the right hon. Gentleman’s poodle. It fetches and carries for him. It barks for him. It bites anybody that he sets it on to.” A similar shade of meaning is used in th

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By Anatoly Liberman

It seems reasonable that brisket should in some way be related to breast: after all, brisket is the breast of an animal.  But the path leading from one word to the other is neither straight nor narrow.  Most probably, it does not even exist.  In what follows I am greatly indebted to the Swedish scholar Bertil Sandahl, who published an article on brisket and its cognates in 1964.  The Oxford English Dictionary has no citations of brisket prior to 1450, but Sandahl discovered bresket in a document written in 1328-1329, and if his interpretation is correct, the date should be pushed back quite considerably.  Before 1535, the favored (possibly, the only) form in English was bruchet(te).

The English word is surrounded with many look-alikes from several languages: Middle French bruchet, brichet, brechet (Modern French bréchet ~ brechet “breastbone”; in French dialects, one often finds -q- instead of -ch-), Breton bruch ~ brusk ~ bresk “breast (of a horse),” along with bruched “breast,” Modern Welsh brysced (later brwysged ~ brysged), and Irish Gaelic brisgein “cartilage (as of the nose).”  Then there are German Bries ~ Briesel ~ Brieschen ~ Bröschen “the breast gland of a calf,” Old Norse brjósk “cartilage, gristle,” and several words from the modern Scandinavian languages for “sweetbread” (Swedish bräs, Norwegian bris, and Danish brissel), which, as it seems, belong here too (sweetbread is, of course, not bread: it is the pancreas or thymus, especially of a calf, used as food; -bread in sweetbread is believed to go back to an old word for “flesh”).  Many words for “breast” in the languages of the world begin with the grating sound groups br- ~ gr- ~ -khr-, as though to remind us of our breakable, brittle, fragile bones (fraction, fragile, and fragment, all going back to the same Latin root, once began with bhr).

At first blush, brisket, with its pseudo-diminutive suffix, looks like a borrowing from French.  But there is a good rule: a word is native in a language in which it has recognizable cognates.  To be sure, sometimes no cognates are to be seen or good candidates present themselves in more languages than one, but etymology is not an exact science, and researchers should be thankful for even approximate signposts along the way.  In French, bréchet is isolated (and nothing similar has been found in other Romance languages), while in Germanic, brjósk, bris, bräs, and others (see them above) suggest kinship with brisket.  Therefore, the opinion prevails that brisket is of Germanic origin.  Émile Littré, the author of a great, perennially useful French dictionary, thought that the French word had been borrowed from English during the Hundred Year War (1337-1453), and most modern etymologists tend to agree with him.  Then the Celtic words would also be from English (for they too are isolated in their languages), and the etymon of brisket would be either Low (that is, northern) German bröske “sweetbread” or Old Norse brjósk, allied to Old Engl. breosan “break.”  The original meaning of brisket may have been “something (easily breakable?) in the breast of a (young?) animal.”  If so, contrary to expectation, brisket is not related to breast, for breast appears to have been coined with the sense “capable of swelling,” r

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By Anatoly Liberman

The idea of this post, as of several others before it, has been suggested by a query from a correspondent.  A detailed answer would have exceeded the space permitted for the entire set of monthly gleanings, so here comes an essay on the word rum, written on the first rather than the last Wednesday of October.  But before I get to the point, I would like to make a remark on the amnesia that afflicts students of word origins.  Etymology is perhaps the only completely anonymous branch of linguistics.  When people look up a word, they hardly ever ask who reconstructed its history.  Surround seems to be related to round, but it is not.  On the other hand, soot does not make us think of sit; yet the two are allied.  Obviously, neither conclusion is trivial.  Even specialists rarely know the names of the discoverers (for those are hard to trace).  Unlike Ohm’s Law or Newton’s laws, etymological knowledge easily becomes faceless common property, a plateau without a single hill to obstruct the view.  To be sure, we have great authorities, such as the OED and Skeat, but Murray, Bradley (the OED’s first great editors) and Skeat authored only some of the statements they made.  In many cases they depended on the findings of their predecessors.  What then was their input?  All is either forgotten or falsely ascribed to them.  Murray could defend his authorship very well.  Skeat, too, in countless letters to the editor, strove (strived: take your pick) for recognition and kept rubbing in the fact that he, rather than somebody else, had elucidated the derivation of this or that word.  Rarely, very rarely do dictionaries celebrate individual discovery.  Thus, pedigree (which French “lent” to English) means “foot of a crane,” from a three-line mark, like the broad arrow used in denoting succession in pedigrees.  This was explained by C. Sweet (no relative of Henry Sweet, the famous philologist and the prototype of Dr. Higgins; I could not find any information on him), and Skeat gave the exact reference to his publication.  Something similar, though less spectacular (because the conclusion is still debatable), happened when language historians began to research the history of the noun rum.

The most universal law of etymology is that we cannot explain the origin of a word unless we have a reasonably good idea of what the thing designated by the word means.  For quite some time people pointed to India as the land in which rum was first consumed and did not realize that in other European languages rum was a borrowing from English.  The misleading French spelling rhum suggested a connection with Greek rheum “stream, flow” (as in rheumatism).  According to other old conjectures, rum is derived from aroma or saccharum.  India led researchers to Sanskrit roma “water” as the word’s etymon, and this is what many otherwise solid 19^th-century dictionaries said.  Webster gave the vague, even meaningless reference “American,” but on the whole, the choice appeared to be between East and West Indies.  Skeat, in the first edition of his dictionary (1882), suggested Malayan origins (from beram “alcoholic drink,” with the loss of the first syllable) and used his habitual eloquence to boost this hypothesis.

Then The Academy, a periodical that enjoyed well-deserved popularity throughout the forty years of its existence (1869-1910), published the following paragraph.  (The Imperial Dictionary [not A Universal Dictionary of the English Language, as Spitzer says] gives it in full, but I suspe

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By Anatoly Liberman

I am looking at the backlog of questions and comments for two months (there were no monthly gleanings at the end of August) and, first of all, want to thank everybody who has read the blog, reinforced my conclusions, disagreed or corrected me, given additional information, and asked questions.

Can American Sign Language (ASL) be viewed as having literacy?  Words mean what people make them mean, and perhaps literacy can be understood in senses not familiar to the majority of speakers.  The term computer literacy has almost turned literacy into a synonym for skills, and yet literacy presupposes an ability to read and write.  Someone who can do neither is illiterate.  Oral societies that later introduced a script are sometimes referred to as preliterate.  From this point of view, ASL does not look to me as a language having literacy.  I am not a specialist in ASL and argue from the position of an outsider.  All the deaf and mute Americans I know use English as their medium of written communication, even though they consider ASL their native language.

Is Standard English pronunciation a viable concept? I think it is, even if only to a point.  People’s accents differ, but some expectation of a more or less leveled pronunciation (that is, of the opposite of a broad dialect) in great public figures and media personalities probably exists.  Jimmy Carter seems to have made an effort to sound less Georgian after he became President.  If I am not mistaken, John Kennedy tried to suppress some of the most noticeable features of his Bostonian accent.  But perhaps those changes happened under the influence of the new environment.  In some countries, the idea of “Standard” has a stronger grip on the public mind than in North America.  I have often heard people remarking: “He speaks beautiful French” or “Her Italian is wonderful,” and those remarks referred not only to style and vocabulary but also to the speaker’s delivery.  Additionally, some local accents are usually called ugly, though from a linguist’s point of view, an ugly native accent is nonsense.

This brings me to some questions of usage.  Discussing lie and lay for the umpteenth time would be even less productive than beating ~ flogging a dead horse.  In some areas, the distinction has been lost, and so be it.  English has lost so many words in the course of its history that the disappearance of one more will change nothing.  So lay back and relax.  The same holds for dived/dove, sneaked/snuck, and the rest.  I only resent the idea that some tyrants wielding power make freedom loving people distinguish between lie and lay.  Editors and teachers should be conservative in their language tastes.  In works of fiction, characters are supposed to speak the way they do in real life, but in other situations it may be prudent to lag behind the latest trend as long as several variants coexist.

A curious detail of usage is the word dilemna.  Our correspondent asked why several decades ago this form had become current on the East Coast.  I confessed that I had never heard about this monster, but later searched the Internet.  It turned out that some other people are as ignorant of it as I was, but I discovered that dilemna had invaded the English speaking world from New Zealand to Canada.  Some children were even taught to pronounce -mn-.  Here is probably a situation that will provoke no disagreement: dilemna is unacceptable.  The first suggestion that comes to mind is that someone decided to change the spelling of dilemma under the influence of words like column,

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In the second episode of The Oxford Comment, Lauren Appelwick and Michelle Rafferty celebrate geekdom! They interview a Jeopardy champion, talk sex & attraction with a cockatoo, discover what makes an underdog a hero, and “geek out” with some locals.

Subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes!

Featured in this podcast:

Jesse Sheidlower, Editor-at-Large (North America) of the Oxford English Dictionary, author of The F-Word

*     *     *     *     *

Matt Caporaletti, “Advertising Account Supervisor from Westwood, NJ,” Jeopardy champion

*     *     *     *     *

David P. Barash and Judith Lipton authors of Payback: Why We Retaliate, Redirect Aggression, and Take Our Revenge

*     *     *     *     *

Scott T. Allison and George R. “Al” Goethels, authors of Heroes: What They Do and Why We Need Them. Check out their heroes blog!

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By Alexander Humez

Phone (from Greek φωνή ’sound [of the voice], voice, sound, tone’) shows up in English as a prefix (in, e.g., phonograph), a root form (in, e.g., phonetics), a free-standing word (phone), and as a suffix (in, e.g., gramophone) of which A. F. Brown lists well over a hundred in his monumental Normal and Reverse English Word List, though considering that -phone in the sense of “-speaker of” can be tacked onto the end of any combining root that designates a language (as in Francophone), the list of possibilities is considerably greater.

Urdang, Humez, and Zettler in their Suffixes and Other Word-Final Elements of English distinguish among four senses in which the suffix -phone is used (six for -phonic), an overloading that has occasionally resulted in polysemy, where a word has come to have multiple meanings, whether through semantic evolution (e.g., telephone, which has come some distance from its original meaning, now no longer in use), independent invention (e.g., hypophone, which was coined by two different people to mean two very different things), or different etymological histories (e.g., diaphone, in which the -phone of one has a different immediate derivation from that of the other). Follow THIS LINK for a short list of polysemic words ending in -phone, each of which is accompanied by three examples or definitions, two of which are correct and the other of which is bogus. See if you can identify the phonies.

Alexander Humez is the co-author of Short Cuts: A Guide to Oaths, Ring Tones, Ransom Notes, Famous Last Words, and Other Forms of Minimalist Communication with his brother, Nicholas Humez, and Rob Flynn. The Humez brothers also collaborated on Latin for People, Alpha to Omega, A B C Et Cetera, Zero to Lazy Eight (with Joseph Maguire), and On the Dot. To see Humez’s previous posts, click here.

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By Dennis Baron

Every once in a while some concerned citizen decides to do something about the fact that English has no gender-neutral pronoun. They either call for such a pronoun to be invented, or they invent one and champion its adoption. Wordsmiths have been coining gender-neutral pronouns for a century and a half, all to no avail. Coiners of these new words insist that the gender-neutral pronoun is indispensable, but users of English stalwartly reject, ridicule, or just ignore their proposals.

Recently, Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan called for a gender-neutral pronoun:

The whole pronouns-must-agree-with-antecedents thing causes me utter agony. Do you know how many paragraphs I’ve had to tear down and rebuild because you can’t say, “Somebody left their cheese in the fridge”, so you say, “Somebody left his/her cheese in the fridge”, but then you need to refer to his/her cheese several times thereafter and your writing ends up looking like an explosion in a pedants’ factory? … I crave a non-risible gender-neutral (not “it”) third person sing pronoun in the way normal women my age crave babies.          The Guardian, July 24, 2010, p. 70

English is a language with a vocabulary so large that every word in it seems to have a dozen synonyms, and yet this particular semantic black hole remains unfilled. As Tom Utley complains in the Daily Mail,

It never ceases to infuriate me, for example, that in this cornucopia of a million words, there’s no simple, gender-neutral pronoun standing for ‘he-or-she’.

That means we either have to word our way round the problem by using plurals – which don’t mean quite the same thing – or we’re reduced to the verbose and clunking construction: ‘If an MP steals taxpayers’ money, he or she should be ashamed of himself or herself.’ (‘Themselves’, employed to stand for a singular MP, would, of course, be a grammatical abomination).          London Daily Mail, June 13, 2009

The traditional gender agreement rule states that pronouns must agree with the nouns they stand for both in gender and in number. A corollary requires the masculine pronoun when referring to groups comprised of men and women. But critics argue that such generic masculines – for example, “Everyone loves his mother” – actually violate the gender agreement part of the pronoun agreement rule. And they warn that the common practice of using they to avoid generic he violates number agreement: in “Everyone loves their mother,” everyone is singular and their is plural. Only a new pronoun, something like ip, coined in 1884, can save us from the error of the generic masculine or the even worse error of singular “they.”

Such forms as co, xie, per, and en abound in science fiction, where gender is frequently bent, and they pop up with some regularity in online transgender discussion groups, where the traditional masculine and feminine pronouns are out of place. But today’s word coiners seem unaware that gender-neutral English pronouns have been popping up, then disappearing without much trace, since the mid-nineteenth century.

According to an 1884 article in the New-York Commercial Advertiser<

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