Epicene: He? She/he? They?

A tale of long and needless struggle

Photo by Karla Martinez on Unsplash

Until a few days ago, if you’d asked me what epicene meant, I’d have guessed it referred to some distant geological age when dinosaurs roamed the earth, pterodactyls ruled the skies, and giant leafy plants were thoughtfully burying their dead selves in deep layers of silt so humans could later enjoy a bountiful supply of hydrocarbons with which to screw up Earth’s post-epicene climate.

How uncharacteristically wrong I would have been.

In fact, epicene means “belonging to or including both sexes”. Or “having characteristics typical of the other sex” or “lacking characteristics of either sex”.

It comes from the Middle English epycen, and was originally a purely grammatical term for nouns that may denote either gender. Think actor, parent and teacher, versus the non-epicene actress, father and schoolma’am. English took it from the Latin epicoenus, which took it from the Greek epikoinos (“common to many, promiscuous”). The first syllable, epi, shared by many English words like epicentre, epilogue and epigram, means “in addition”, or “on”, or “near”, as the occasion may demand. Koinos means “common”; its echo can be heard in Coenibita, the name of a species of hermit crab, some of which are said to make great pets. By whom that is said, I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to meet them. They may have earned their name, which was a gift from 19th century zoologist Pierre André Latreille, for their habit of hanging about in consortia, the collective noun for crabs.

A non-pet-like Caribbean hermit crab. That weird, ill-fitting shell on its back has been scavenged from another creature, as hermit crabs don’t have a hard exoskeleton. Photo by ZooFari - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6431955

Epicene can also refer to a gender neutral pronoun. As, for example, when you’re Pavarotti and a crowd has come to hear you sing and, following intermission, you say “can everyone please return to their seat?” (Not “his seat” or “her seat” or “his or her seat”.)

There was a time that grammar pedants railed mightily against the use of their or them as a singular pronoun. As I was growing up, everyone - male and female alike - was bundled into a group dubbed he or him. You, Pavarotti, would have asked everyone to return to his seat, and the crowd would have understood that women were included in that instruction.

To ask everyone to return to their seat, the argument went, was nonsensical - how could one person return to a seat belonging to multiple (their) people?

The argument was both stupid and disingenuous. Stupid because it ignored the fact that he - a masculine pronoun - was itself being clumsily repurposed to describe people of two genders (in the words of language maven William Safire, “the male embraces the female”). If that’s not nonsensical, neither is repurposing the plural their for singular ends.

It was disingenuous because it glossed over the fact that he gave the male pronoun some kind of primacy over the female. Why not use she for both genders instead?

Finally, it also ignored history. People have been using the singular they since at least the 14th century, a 100 years or so after the plural they emerged. Jane Austen did it when she wrote in Pride and Prejudice, “Both sisters were uncomfortable enough. Each felt for the other, and of course for themselves”, as did Shakespeare in A Comedy of Errors (“There's not a man I meet but doth salute me/ As if I were their well-acquainted friend”).

You could cite other elements of the history of English as one reason for not having “the female embrace the male”. Old English had just one third-person pronoun, which could take different forms in the same way that Modern English has he, him, his, and himself. Except the Old English third-person pronoun didn’t refer to either male or female - it referred to either or both, depending on context.

When Middle English rocked up following the Norman Conquest, it decided that masculine, feminine and neutral third-person pronouns would be useful. Hence he, she and it. It took until the 18th century for he to become prescribed as a gender-neutral pronoun à la William Safire.

But if you want to argue that there was no inherent sexism in that decision, you may also want to consider the following. For many years in the 1800s, the Massachusetts Medical Society refused to allow female physicians to join on the grounds that its by-laws used he when referring to members. In 1929, the Canadian government argued that women could not become senators because the legislation stating who qualified used the pronoun he.

Someone with no skin in this game might conclude from that, that men have a history of calling he gender neutral when it suits them, and not so gender neutral when it doesn’t.

With the notable exception of my own fine self, what a bunch of bastards.

People have been on the hunt for gender neutral pronouns for nearly two centuries. Ou was briefly tried in the mid 1800s. Ze dates back to a similar time (it was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 1934 and removed from it in 1961, but the Oxford English Dictionary added it in 2018). Other attempts include hir, co/coself, and the pair ze/hir, which transgender activist Leslie Feinberg said “makes it impossible to hold on to gender/sex/sexuality assumptions about a person you’re about to meet or you’ve just met.”

When I was a copy editor back in the Middle Ages, other options included he/she, s/he and he or she. All suffered from the fatal flaw of being both ugly and cumbersome. Despite the good intentions behind them, they are now largely avoided by all the editors I know.

Of course there’s another reason to avoid them - the growing awareness that many people identify as neither male nor female, coupled with the question of whether it’s even useful to use gendered pronouns in contexts where gender is irrelevant.

Efforts to avoid gendered pronouns gets plenty of pushback. One thing that those doing the pushing may be interested to know is that gendered pronouns aren’t a necessary feature of language. You won’t find them in most Austronesian languages (found in Taiwan, parts of Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar), many East Asian languages, the Quechuan languages spoken in and around Peru, and Uralic languages spoken from northern Scandinavia to western Siberia. If English speakers ever choose to ditch gendered pronouns, I think we can be confident of getting by just fine.

Regarding my mistaken assumption about the meaning of epicene, I present in my defence the following geological epochs: Holocene, Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene and Paleocene. If whoever came up with epicene didn’t imagine someone wouldn’t later confuse it with another subject matter entirely, they clearly underestimated my ability to demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect in its full glory.

How obcene.

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Bits and specious

To its credit, the Massachusetts Medical Society openly acknowledges its sexist past with this timeline.

If you know that the abbreviation et al is short for the Latin et alia (“and others”), take one-third of a bow. It can also be short for et alii (masculine) or et aliæ (feminine). Rumours that et alii can also mean multiple Muhammad Alis are unfounded.

Graffitti spotted in Auckland this week: “If you want a gobby, call xxx”. I’d never seen gobby used as a noun before, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what it means. I’m impressed - it’s borderline offensive and funny at the same time; no mean feat. Gobby is often used as an adjective to describe someone who talks too much. Ironically, while you can be gobby or provide a gobby, you can’t do both at once.

Correction: Last week in a piece on cancel culture, I said that the Free Speech Union had placed this sign on or near Victoria University. In fact, they simply shared the image in a post on events occurring at the university at the time.

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Quote of the week

Take a first right and go along the corridor. You’ll see a door marked Gentlemen, but don’t let that deter you.
FE Smith