Communication and Gender

An article recently published on CNN.com brings up an interesting point- “Everyone loves his mother.” What about it? As the article points out, one of the main problems with that sentence is it implies gender, but replacing “his” with “his or her” sounds bulky and awkward while replacing “his” with “their” is grammatically incorrect.

What’s the significance? According to the article, it seems that several people have been tweeting about the lack of a gender neutral pronoun instead of writing short sentences to update readers on their daily lives. That means that Twitter is actually being used for something potentially very important as “more than 100 proposals” for a new pronoun- Including “ip” and “thon”- have recently emerged.

Of course, for all of the grammarians out there this is not a new concept, but the issue is finally getting some real attention from media outlets that have picked up on the fact that people around the country have been tweeting about “his” and other gender implicating phrases like, “men at work.”

For anyone majoring in anything that has to do with communication it might be a good idea to keep an ear out for a new pronoun. In Public Relations, PR counselors always seek to address everyone fairly and equally to get their messages across. A new pronoun could benefit anyone in PR immensely by making it that much easier to address all audiences simultaneously, without having to worry about the correctness of the pronoun.

Ditch Britney Spears Twitter for something a bit more educational. And, please, stop writing “2” instead of “too.”