It is doubtful that these will catch on with the wider public. In his essay, Baron writes that “even though more than 100 of these invented words have been coined, none succeeded. Thon and he’er, perhaps the most popular – and they were never really popular – appeared in Webster’s New International Dictionary, and you could look them up in your Funk & Wagnalls. But they were eventually dropped because not enough people used them. These pronouns fill a need, but none has been widely adopted.”

Baron calls them “the words that failed”, arguing that “What has succeeded is singular they, which arose naturally in English hundreds of years ago, and is used both by speakers and writers concerned that their pronouns be inclusive, and also by many who don’t give the matter much thought at all.”

Singular appeal

“There’s been a whole history of attempts to create a gender-neutral pronoun, such as the Spivak pronouns used in role-playing games online. It’s hard to keep track of them,” says Sally McConnell-Ginet, Professor Emeritus in linguistics at Cornell University and the co-author of Language and Gender. “We’re much less likely to accept a new form like that than to just allow ‘they’ to expand its scope a bit so that you can freely use it to talk about specific individuals – and that is happening more and more.”

She points to one example that indicates we could embrace ‘they’ as a singular pronoun. “There is a parallel in the history of English. We used to have ‘you’ contrasting with ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, and now we happily use ‘you’. We say ‘you go to the store’, not ‘you goes to the store’ – even if addressing a single individual, we still use the plural verb form,” she says. “People don’t seem to be upset about that – why can’t we do the same with ‘they’? Just let it expand to do this job.”