It has always bothered me that we don’t have gender-neutral pronouns. People have tried with things like “ner” or “heir” or some such. Personally, I’ve always liked “it.” What’s the big deal? We are all its, after all. What is with humans that they mind being referred to in the abstract as “it”? But using “it” in this way just makes me seem like a freak, and I have more than enough freak cred. So some number of years ago, I just gave up. I decided that English was a language where the masculine was the neuter. I wasn’t happy about this but this struck me as the least terrible solution to the problem.
One thing I most definitely don’t like is the use of gender-neutral plural pronouns. “Someone entered the room; in the darkness, I could tell they were dressed in a gorilla costume.” What nonsense that is! It makes me long for my preferred “it” solution. Not only do we get a plural pronoun, but we are forced to conjugate the verb incorrectly. If anything could make me flee to Veracruz and take up Spanish full time, it is this approach to the English language.
An even worse solution is to use both genders. I’ll admit, there are times when this actually works just fine. But we end up with problems. Consider: “First, he or she should find his or her seat and then alert his or her friends via text that he or she has arrived.” And then there is the whole question of which gender should go first. Why is it always the male? Hmm?!
This brings us to the standard solution to this problem. People who think about this kind of thing have decided that the best thing to do when dealing with a neuter situation is to alternate. The first time a neuter is needed, use the male. The second time, use the female. And so on. It still leaves us with the decision of which gender to start with, but I guess that’s okay.
My problem with this is that it is a burden. I did not become a writer so I could do accounting. And since most of what I write is short, I would have to remember from article to article what gender I last used. It is a mess. In all things grammatical, I try to make my life simple and the alternating solution does just the opposite.
There is one solution that I very much like. We could just make the neuter female. Our society is so male-focused that a good step toward a more just society would be to make all our genderless examples be women. It would be a good thing for young people to be constantly reminded woman are at least the equal of men. And if it ever got out of hand, we could go back to making the neuter male. The problem is that just as with “it,” I don’t think I can do this on my own. Freak cred and all. But if anyone is starting a movement, sign me up.
Over the past few months, I have come up with a solution. It is a modification of the alternation method. But instead of alternating between instances, I am going to alternate between years. So starting on the first of this year, I switched to the neuter female as you can see in my article, The Worst American Addiction. This means that odd numbered years are female and even numbered years are male. But the great thing is that it doesn’t matter. I’ve only picked female because it is a new year and I was using male before that. The system would work best if people randomly picked their years so that any given reader would see a natural diversity of undetermined genders.
But there is another good aspect of my system. It makes the English language universe better and more egalitarian regardless of what anyone else does. However, the truth is that I don’t especially care. This system is designed to make me feel better. Because this whole subject really bugs me and has bugged me for decades. This decision will remove a small amount of anxiety from my life. But I hope the reader appreciates it — whoever she may be.
There is a kind of addiction in the United States that is destroying it. It isn’t new. In fact, it has been around for so long, it is invisible. It is the addiction of superiority. If you watch the right kind of television, you will see it everywhere. My favorite example is the court show. I find these shows deeply disturbing. In fact, I find them so disturbing that I’ve come up with a theory — probably wrong — to make them more palatable. I believe friends get together and pretend to sue each other to make a little cash and to get their faces on the television. But clearly, if most viewers thought this, they would not watch. Indeed, even with my theory, I find the shows repellent.
The usually great Matt Yglesias engaged in a bit of false equivalence earlier this week, 
Already, in his obituaries, he is being remembered more as a poet than as a politician, as a phenomenon more than a man. Poets are useful, even in politics. Phenomena can be beautiful. But the marginalization of Mario Cuomo was a deliberate political act, a bipartisan one, truth be told. It was a way to shuffle what he stood for off into decorous irrelevance. The people who sidelined Mario Cuomo from our national discussion did not include Ronald Reagan. It was Bill Clinton who did that and, sadly, Mario Cuomo himself, who, by the end of it, was so politically feeble that he lost to an unremarkable hack like George Pataki. Now Mario Cuomo is dead, and George Pataki is (seriously) contemplating a run for president of the United States. Now Mario Cuomo is dead, and his absence from our national discussion is being used in some quarters as a cautionary tale to the rising progressive movement within the Democratic party. The same forces that worked to marginalize him will be brought to bear at some point against Elizabeth Warren… You can count on that. Now Mario Cuomo is dead, and that seems like little more than confirmation of something we all suspected for decades.
On this day in 1936, the great songwriter and performer