Ze and Hir? Displacing English in the Home of English
"The Oxford Dictionary has named 'selfie' the word of the year, narrowly beating out 'twerk'. In a related story, the funeral for the English language will be this Saturday," quipped Conan O'Brien.
How ironic it is that a dirge for English might be intoned at England's Oxford University itself.
A pamphlet was circulated recently at the great British school urging that gender neutral pronouns be substituted for traditional words so that transgendered people would not take offense. "Ze" could sub for "he" or "she", for example.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
G.K. Chesterton — about whom Oxford University Press still publishes books — might be among the most amazed at this alteration of the English language. Chesterton was a twentieth century English writer whose uniquely cast prose and poetry ranged from philosophy and theology to humor, cultural commentary and mystery novels.
"Every time one man says to another, 'Tell us plainly what you mean?' he is assuming the infallibility of language," wrote Chesterton. The human knows "that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest." Further, he said, "there are abroad in the world and doing strange and terrible service in it crimes that have never been condemned and virtues that have never been christened."
To try to invent a new word for all the "tints of the soul" would take us back to the Tower of Babel. Linguistic chaos would displace the cosmos of language, on which civilization and culture depend — as the Babelists learned the hard way.
Chesterton wrote that one human in communication with another "believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals."
"Plain language" depends on objectivity. "Infallibility" means it is trustworthy, and even when we cannot manufacture a new word to describe what seems uncommon to our experience, the communication code between humans will invest traditional words with more nuanced meanings.
How often do we struggle for a new term, and, when unable to conjure it, do we fall back on, "you know what I am trying to say"?
To refer to a fellow student as "ze" rather than "he" or "she" is anything but objective and "plain". The inference: "You look like a female to me, and thus I should refer to you as 'she', but I cannot presume upon your frame of mind and how you identify yourself — which may be male or female or some other form of gender. Therefore I will deny what appears to be plain about your gender and concede to the possibility you may not be in your consciousness at all what I am observing about your physical structure."
Such linguistic acrobatics may be possible in the contemporary academic circus with all its safety nets, but probably impossible in the world beyond the intellectual big tops. To add to the misery, one must see into the soul of a person who may or may not be a transsexual, lest by using, say, "ze" rather than "he" or "she" even more offense is given.
I think of a dear friend, a male, whose traits were feminine but who loved and was happily married to a vivacious, abundantly structured (to be polite) woman. Observing his outward traits — his dainty walk, his lady-like gestures — might have suggested "ze" would be appropriate, but it would have humiliated him.
C.S. Lewis of Oxford and (mostly) Cambridge, and, like Chesterton, an expert on the English language, reflected on the importance of the objectivity of language. He was concerned that when a word "no longer tells you facts about the object" that "it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object."
That is, the trustworthiness of objectivity is lost, and language is up for grabs in blurry subjectivism.
Some people in their communication style are merely data transmitters who have little care about what the audience does with the information he or she delivers. The true communicator, however, cares deeply. The data transmitter is satisfied in just delivering the data, but the communicator wants to give the information in such a way people will act upon it to their benefit.
God's Logos is much more than data transmission. Nothing proves it like the Incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth. He shows that plain communication is costly, and carefully constructed. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, and the Gospels are the treasury of words that changed history. Had Jesus been satisfied to merely deliver data and then dust Himself off and exit there would never have been a cross. Human beings would know new "stuff" in their heads, but comprehending truth in the heart requires a communicator.
And a communicator must speak "plainly" and objectively.
We all should be communicators, caring that we influence people with words, and that their lives are better for it, however they perceive of themselves. Yet we are unable to enter into one another's subjective perceptions of their own identity. We have to rely on the verbal codes that have transferred meaning across the centuries, and allow the receiver to parse the subjective nuances for himself or herself.
Or ze or hir.
