by C.B. Hall Things are getting out of hand. All over the country, if not the English-speaking world, editors are confronting the confusion wreaked by the words they, them, their, and theirs when referring to a non-binary person determined to escape the confinement of he and she in describing him- or herself.
What's an editor to do when a press release comes through that introduces a person by name and then, in the next paragraph, begins describing the individual as they? All the more important, what's the reader to do? It's natural to wonder who the multiple people apparently referred to as they might be, but after a head-scratching moment one realizes: That's not multiple people - it's one person!
It's a recipe for cognitive chaos, exactly what journalism strives to avoid.
Ladies, gentlemen and binary people: Meet han.
Han, with the vowel pronounced much as the a in hat, is the Finnish word for he, or she, or a person whose sex is unknown or not suited to the context. (In Finnish, the word is actually hän, with those two dots over the vowel to indicate the short a rather than the "ah" sound; but, conveniently enough for the native speaker of English, omitting the dots leaves something that designates the short a anyway.)
Han is much like the neologism Ms., which was coined to conceal a woman's marital status. Now, however, we are declining to identify the person's sex - or gender, in the sense of an individual's self-identification.
We're not talking about linguistic whimsy here. In Finland, the word is the name of a weekly feature, "Hän" with the two dots, in the nation's leading news-magazine, Suomen Kuvalehti; the feature highlights an individual who is making news. If you look up the column online, Google Translate will offer you an English-language rendition - entitled "He." Ouch.
The Associated Press guideline meanwhile falls short of desirability, too. A recent article published by the news agency notes that "The AP Stylebook, the journalism industry’s standard word usage guide, advises that 'as much as possible, AP also uses they/them/their as a way of accurately describing and representing a person who uses those pronouns for themself.'" Ouch again.
Han is utilitarian, for example, when you simply don't know anything about the person described. I offer myself, C.B. Hall, by way of example. The initials say nothing about my being male or female. When I recently requested a particular piece of music on a favorite radio program, signing my email thus, the program's hostess obliged me even to the point of announcing on the air that the piece was requested by a listener. In the next sentence, she referred to me as "they." Hmm.
We grammar fanatics feel our hearts sink when our language's users (or abusers) resort to they to describe an unknown individual. Regrettably, the practice appears almost universal in English usage. While the Vermont Legislative Counsel, which drafts our laws, has admittedly taken to using the more apt "he or she" where "he" once reigned supreme, "he or she," whatever its adherence to the demands of inclusiveness, does not roll sweetly off the tongue, and could stand replacement. Han to the rescue.
The word works well even with animals. Our cat, an ex-stray, appeared unannounced one day on our lawn, looking for a home. We could not determine the kitten's sex from its undeveloped genitals, but we did welcome him or her unreservedly into our home, and decided simply to name the family's new member Han.
Han has the further advantage of being ready to serve; we don't need to coin a word for the purpose at hand. We can use the same pronoun in the objective case - as in "We met han at the train station" - and simply add the apostrophe and s to indicate the possessive case. Simple.
Language evolves, and the English language especially has evolved by borrowing freely from other languages, including Finnish, which of course has loaned us the word sauna. So why not make this very useful pronoun our own, too?
And you can just call me han.
C.B. Hall is a freelance writer from Southern Vermont.