Category: reading

Pronouns: They, Them, Their. . . and Thon

I sometimes struggle in a world that seems to be changing at a dizzying pace. Even though I don’t see myself as resistant to change (for the most part), some of my efforts to keep pace, I fear, are ineffective. It often leaves me feeling frustrated, and I think that’s because I’m afraid of being left behind, of becoming obsolete or being found insubstantial. So, for example, if I lose connectivity with the internet and my TV thus taunts me with a simple message to that effect, I stand like a fool in front of my TV with a collection of remote controls (some of which I should have parted with years ago and another of which I suspect is an egg timer), and begin clicking every button. When I’ve exhausted all available buttons and have shaken or pounded the life out of each gadget, I unplug every cord from every nearby device and replug them one by one, and hope for the best. Some areas where learning could — and should —take place, just don’t exhibit obvious signs of growth.

Where it concerns change, however, in another realm, I try mightily to trot along with the crowd, and maintain an open and willing mind. It’s indeed heartening to see that our society is striving to create a little distance between reality and our hurtful patriarchal past. In particular, there’s a long overdue yet growing sensitivity with regard to gender-based identity. Admittedly, there’s a great deal of push-pull in the exercise — as can be expected in times of great societal re-shaping. The tussle reflects most overtly in the writing of laws — with each law passed that endeavors to provide a measure of fairness and comfort, there’s another one that sends the pendulum swinging wide in the opposite direction. Change can be uncomfortable — big change is hard.

One change that should be coming more easily to me is surprising and vexing me with how difficult I am finding it. My background includes a solid understanding of language (I have my high school Spanish teacher Sr. Faria to thank for instilling a love of foreign languages), so the expanded applications and use of the pronouns they/them/their to refer to a gender-neutral person should result in a positive embracing of the utilitarian nature of these pronouns. I say utilitarian because they, them, and their have long been used to refer to an antecedent of indefinite gender, even in the singular. (Here is a perfectly acceptable example: Every child wants to be loved unconditionally by their parents. I used to wrestle with the acceptability of using a pronoun that implied a plural antecedent, and would have said or written the sentence in this cumbersome way: “Every child wants to be loved unconditionally by his or her parents.”) Having been assured that Chaucer on occasion used the plural pronoun in similar instances, I am reasonably appeased.

It is one thing to accept the new normal, to get totally behind it — it’s another thing entirely to put it into practice or to navigate the new contexts in which I find it. This morning I read an article in The Atlantic about homeownership that was a fresh and highly engaging perspective. I was taken by surprise by the claim that homeowners these days are staying put longer than was happening when my husband and I bought our first house in the mid-80’s. Compare the five-to-seven year average from 1985 to mid-2000’s with the current average of 13 years, figures provided by HousingWire, a real estate news outfit. As I read along, musing that our first ownership lasted exactly 13 years — evidently, we far exceeded the average, I wondered about the reasons why homeowners these days stay put for a much longer stretch of time. It’s an idea that needs to be parsed, but perhaps later. I quickly got hung up on the featured homeowners, that weren’t homeowners, per se, but rather, homeowner (singular). The proliferation of they, them and their kept tripping me up, so unaccustomed am I to the evolving nature of gender-marking pronouns. I quickly found that my reading comprehension — which is never sharp in the best of circumstances — dropped to an even lower level. Unable to get back on track, I went into a panic. I was overthinking every sentence, looking at each as a mechanical arrangement of lifeless words that performed specific functions but conveyed no meaning. Subject-verb-object or subject-verb-adjective-object or subject-verb-possessive pronoun-object. I could no longer make sense of what I was reading, and it was all because I couldn’t get beyond the fact that a plural pronoun was being used for a singular antecedent. It’s like when someone tells you not to think about such-and-such, and then all you can do is think about it. At one point, I contemplated recasting the subject as a couple instead of one person, but that had no hope of working because I knew that the story was about Neilson, just Neilson, not Neilson and Amelia, or Neilson and David, or Neilson and their pet rabbit Twinkie. (See what I mean? Didn’t you just think that Neilson and somebody else had a pet rabbit Twinkie?)

Change is not easy. A part of me wants to re-read the article over and over until it feels natural. There’s a lot to recommend that approach, because it’s through repeated exposure that I’ll become accustomed to the pronouns’ new applications. On the other hand, I’m aware that there is another set of pronouns already out there that, unlike they/them/their; always refer to a singular, gender-neutral antecedent. Thon, thon’s, and thonself, where “thon” is a contracted form of “that one”. I find these words appealing because they’re so unfamiliar that I wouldn’t already have a fixed understanding or pre-conceived concept of their meaning. The freshness of these words would — in my mind — suit the new expectation. If I read the phrase, “When Neilson bought thon first home…” I wouldn’t have to first undo my understanding about Neilson and someone else; it would be Neilson. . . just gender-neutral Neilson.

It’s doubtful that thon and its other forms will ever garner enough followers to make it a viable pronoun. In my opinion, it’s a tragic waste, given that Merriam Webster had preserved its place in their dictionary from 1934-1961; alas, it was removed due to lack of use. Thon’s inner flame was extinguished too early, one might say.

As disappointed as I am that enough people are unlikely to be inspired to resurrect a perfectly adequate but demoted word, I’m nevertheless invigorated by this recent evidence of the transformative nature of our language’s pronouns. It is hoped that the adoption by the masses of better means to communicate gender identity will result in greater understanding and empathy. Now to invest the effort required to become skilled in their expanded uses. Right alongside efforts to identify remote control devices, as well as cords running — at times mysteriously — from wall outlets to contrivances like modems, cable boxes, security cameras, Roku streaming stick, Sonos speakers, Wii gizmo, and (oh, yes!) the TV.

Learning About How Trees Talk to Each Other (Another Book Report)

Whenever I make the 90 minute drive from my house to my sister’s, I turn on NPR and thus convert what might be a stressful trip into one of enlightenment. The trick is to leave earlier than I need to or to never have a fixed arrival time. Having removed that stressor, I’m usually not bothered by stop-and-go traffic, which, let’s face it, through Boston and down to “The Split” is pretty much a given. I’m a fan of “Hidden Brain” hosted by the honey-voiced Shankar Vedantam and “Fresh Air” with the endearing Terry Gross.

On New Year’s Eve Day I was delighted to find myself with Ira Flatow and his “Science Friday” program. (For years I thought his name was Ira Plato — it was only in looking up the correct spelling for this post that I made the discovery that I’d had it wrong all these years.) His guests were two science editors, and the three of them had a congenial share session, rhapsodizing over their favorite books released in 2021. (That’s one of the things I love about Ira — he always conducts such cozy and benign interviews, never the “gotcha” kind. One imagines a coffee-house setting, with everyone ranging around a low table, sipping craft coffee while burrowed into deep, pillowy sofas.)

Of the twelve “favorites” being reviewed, I was most intrigued by Suzanne Simard’s memoir, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Buying the book was a bold move for me, as I was acutely aware that three science minds were recommending it. I feared I would quickly become adrift in the technicalities. Well, yes, I did get rather lost in the weeds — no pun intended. But I congratulate myself that, for once, I persevered despite my ignorance in all things dendrological. I just finished the book this week and FedExed it across the country to my daughter, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, therefore ticking the relevancy box (as will quickly become apparent), and being further reassured that I was gifting it in the right direction because she’s someone who casually throws around words like ecosystem and nitrogen in the same way that I invoke terms associated with ice cream flavors and toppings.

Suzanne Simard grew up in the forests of British Colombia, descending from a family of loggers. Her close physical ties to the land inspired her educational and career choices, ultimately earning her a PhD in forest sciences from Oregon State University. Throughout her story we have a sense that, as convincing as the findings from her field studies were, she was forever seeking the blessing of the logging industry policy-makers, who for the longest time remained obtusely resistant to her peer-reviewed studies and her prescriptive solutions to the sickening forests that they were sanctioning. To her enduring frustration, she also was repeatedly and unfairly challenged simply because she was a woman doing serious work in a male-dominated industry. Despite the specious denials by the old guard, her work was meticulous and groundbreaking, flowing naturally from her own curiosity about the underground interactions between trees, both same species and different species. From the beginning, she suspected that trees communicated with each other through a network of mycorrhizal fungi, and that these conduits provided mutual aid when trees underwent stress. I must pause here to reassure you that “mycorrhizal” is as science-y as I dare to get, and I only use it because it is so essential to her work (and because I read that word about 5,000 times in the course of reading her memoir.)

As her story wended its way through decades-long studies and efforts to stimulate sustainable practices, I began to understand her sense of alarm over the fate of North America’s forests. Even though she shuns the spotlight, she has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to inform not just the science community, but the shapers of policy as well as the general public. Central to her mission is educating about the harm inflicted when clear cutting is followed by single-species restock protocols. I now understand, for example, how the “free to grow” practices that the logging industry swore by were failing to produce healthy forests; the strategy of single species cultivation, whereby any and all “competitors” are systematically removed, is an (expensive) exercise in wasteful depletion. Backed up by her own and others’ experiments, Simard has proven that diversity is essential. (Mineral exchanges, for instance, of nitrogen and carbon through the underground mycorrhizal network assure the health of “the neighborhood.”) I can’t help but think of her discoveries as magical. That there’s this whole underground world of tree communication — a mutual aid society, if you will — just blows my mind. It makes me want to dig around some of my trees to examine the mycorrhiza! (But I don’t want to hurt them.)

Later in the book, Simard turns her attention to the predatory crises posed by bark beetles (the mountain pine beetle and the Douglas fir beetle, in particular.) As forests are weakened by both logging practices (directly) and climate change (generally), the beetles have gained the upper hand. The scale of the invasions should have us worried.

Simard’s life’s work has been an effort to encourage conservation. She’s not a combative, in-your-face contrarian. Rather, she takes a nuanced approach, understanding that there’s a workable solution that acknowledges the goals of the logging industry, but remains sensitive to the critical needs of the environment. Her heart is so fully in the fight to get her message out there and, ultimately, to save the forests.

The book has given me a lot to reflect on, and I’ve been looking at my surroundings differently. The most visible evidence of this is that, more than once, someone on the rail trail, in trying to move around me, has had to interrupt my tree gazing as I stand still in the middle of the path with one dog sniffing on one side of the trail and the other (of course) stretching his leash to the other side while I study the crowns and understories of interesting trees (that I’ve made a mental note to learn the names of.)

I highly recommend this memoir, going so far as to say it is an “important” one. That it is relevant and the conclusions credible is a certainty. Don’t be deterred by its scientific bent — I wasn’t, and I’m a baby when it comes to technical reading. I’m much more mindful now (but maybe only slightly more knowledgeable) about ideas such as energy transfer (energy can neither be created nor destroyed) and the whole notion of ecological balance. It forces one to look more carefully at larger contexts when faced with natural (as well as man-induced) events, and to wonder — in the end — about how everything connects.

As my final reward I followed up with the author’s TED Talk, “How Trees Talk to Each Other“. It does a great job of synthesizing her work.

A Thousand Ships

For those paying close attention (and I’m not suggesting that you should be paying close attention), you might have noticed a thematic repetition in some of my choices of books lately. It began with Circe, and having loved that book, I eagerly read The Song of Achilles by the same author, Madeline Miller. I just finished A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, and walked away from it with that same feeling of satisfaction. So, now I’m left puzzling over why I am just now being turned on by stories inspired by Greek mythology. Why now? Why not before?

One would think that there might have been a smidgen of curiosity way back when I was in high school. After all, our school mascot was a Trojan. Perhaps the turn-off was that everyone always considered the name’s other connotation much more naturally than any association with Odysseus, Helen, or Achilles, or just generally the whole Heroic Age. It’s possible that I quailed at the prospect of mispronouncing all those Greek names with a preponderance of vowels (and off-putting diphthongs). It is equally likely that the ancientness of it all failed to inspire me. I think I’m closer to understanding why I now can embrace these stories. The gradual shift within me has to do with a new acceptance of ambiguity, uncertainty. What I mean is, in the past I wouldn’t have been caught dead reading a story centered on the Trojan War, mostly because of archaeologists’ inability to say definitively where Troy was. While the accepted wisdom is that the walled city held an unassailable position at the southern approach to the Dardanelles (along the Turkish straits), I couldn’t imagine investing all that time into reading about an event that may or may not have taken place where the experts were in reasonable agreement that it did take place. Moreover, hedging their claims about the real names behind Homer’s characters only left me even more frustrated. If I were to read a book about war, I wanted a war from the last couple of hundred years. Everything about them seemed more conclusive.

The reason A Thousand Ships appealed to me is because Haynes freely admits (big surprise) that there are enormous gaps in our understanding of the role of women during that ten-year war (and the ten years that followed). With her imagination thus unfettered, she wove a vibrant, highly entertaining tale, one that portrays the female characters in ways that allow us readers to nod vigorously and say, “Yes, I can see how it might have played out that way.” There’s nothing high-brow in Haynes’ writing style; in fact, she very artfully transforms the unapproachable and fabled characters into flawed, mortal, touchable beings.

If you can get beyond the challenge of accurately pronouncing Greek names*, you’ll love this book. (I’m trying to ready myself to read The Odyssey, and maybe I should do the audio version to avoid my own mishandling of names.)

*As I read, I used online pronunciation guides, but even they were not in agreement. Sometimes, the British pronunciation deviated from the U.S. pronunciation, and other “guides” were just rubbish, contradicting rules of Greek phonetics (as I am beginning to understand them).