Whats Your Pronoun?, Dennis Baron
Whats Your Pronoun?, Dennis Baron
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

What's Your Pronoun?
Beyond He and She

Author: Dennis Baron

Narrator: Paul Boehmer

Unabridged: 6 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/21/2020


Synopsis

Contextualizing one of the most pressing cultural questions of our generation, Dennis Baron reveals the untold story of how we got from he and she to zie and hir and singular—they.

Like trigger warnings and gender-neutral bathrooms, pronouns are sparking a national debate, prompting new policies in schools, workplaces, even prisons, about what pronouns to use. Colleges ask students to declare their pronouns along with their majors; corporate conferences print name tags with space to add pronouns; email signatures sport pronouns along with names and titles. Far more than a by-product of the culture wars, gender-neutral pronouns are, however, nothing new. Pioneering linguist Dennis Baron puts them in historical context, noting that Shakespeare used singular-they; women invoked the generic use of he to assert the right to vote (while those opposed to women's rights invoked the same word to assert that he did not include she); and people have been coining new gender pronouns, not just hir and zie, for centuries. Based on Baron's own empirical research, What's Your Pronoun? chronicles the story of the role pronouns have played—and continue to play—in establishing both our rights and our identities. It is an essential work in understanding how twenty-first-century culture has evolved.

About Dennis Baron

Dennis Baron is professor emeritus of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, and has long been a national commentator on language issues, from the Washington Post to NPR and CNN. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Champaign, Illinois.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Mara on January 23, 2020

This is exactly the kind of niche, nerdy history that I enjoy. It was fascinating to hear how English speakers and linguists have lamented the lack of a gender neutral personal singular pronoun for hundreds of years... "a missing word." It is equally interesting to see that speakers have consistentl......more

Goodreads review by Nicky on April 04, 2020

Reviewed for The Bibliophibian. What's Your Pronoun? discusses something that's on a lot of people's minds, for good or bad: the humble part of speech we call the pronoun. Despite what some idiots protest, everybody uses pronouns all the time: I, you, she, he, they... They're ubiquitous in speech and......more

Goodreads review by Elizabeth on August 12, 2021

What's Your Pronoun is an interesting (if slightly repetitive and long-winded) rundown of our struggle with finding an "appropriate" gender-neutral single-person pronoun in the English language. I appreciated that while Baron acknowledged the perceived problems with "they/them" as the pronoun to fit......more

Goodreads review by Oyinda on July 16, 2021

Book 215 of 2021 3.5 ✨ I really recommend this book to everyone. It is so good and eye opening and I learnt a lot.......more

Goodreads review by alex on July 14, 2023

Perfect non-fiction read for pride month. Quick, informative, and not too dry (even funny, at times!), especially if you have an interest in history and politics as well as linguistics. A highlight was the well-researched chronology of invented pronouns, challenging the misconception that these new-f......more