The Grammar of Gender

If you are in India right now, try calling a friend on a Reliance cellphone which has been switched off, and you shall be greeted by the message : 'The person you are trying to reach has switched off his phone'. What makes it particularly ironical is the fact that this message is pre-recorded in a woman's voice.

And no, I am not pointing this out because I bear some grudge against Reliance and Company : all of us, users of English, have a specific linguistic debility in not being able to express ourselves through non-gendered personal pronouns. One way of trying to overcome this is to deliberately use the pronoun 'she' in places where our ears have been familiarised (or, acculturalised) to hearing the pronoun 'he'; so that we may say, 'England expects every person to do her duty', and, 'Every citizen must pay her taxes'. However, such statements can be misleading (especially for a new learner of the English language) if they are taken to imply that men are not be counted as 'English' or as 'citizens' of a country. Another way is to use the compound 'he/she' in all these grammatical locations, but this usage can easily become monotonous and tedious beyond a certain point, and may even disrupt the flow of the argument being put forward.

A third way of trying to get round this problem is to use three new words 'se', 'ser' and 'mer' for the nominative, the possessive, and the accusative cases respectively.

(A) The sentence : 'England expects every man to do his duty' therefore becomes : 'England expects every person to do ser duty'. The word 'ser', that is, stands for 'his/her'.

(B) The sentence : 'If we do not worship God, He will send us to perdition' becomes : 'If we do not worship God, Se will send us to perdition'. The word 'se' is a condensation of 'he/she'.

(C) The sentence : 'When we see a man in distress, we should help him' shall become : 'When we see a person in distress, we should help mer'. The word 'mer' gets rid of the clumsy compound 'him/her'.

To be sure, these three words 'se', 'ser', and 'mer' may sound awkward at the moment, but just as other (new) words are continually flowing into the living stream of the English language, so too over a period of time these words may become part and parcel of our linguistic vocabulary. When that happens, Reliance and Company shall have a more inclusive message on their cellphones : 'The person you are trying to reach has switched off ser phone'.