Andy Borowitz and Ms. Tracy Klugian

Back in 2011, I wrote about satirist Andy Borowitz and his habit of recycling the names of the imaginary people he quotes. The names that had caught my eye were Tracy Klugian, Harland Dorrinson (or Harlan Dorinson) and Davis Logsdon. I also observed that the pronoun "she" was a rarity among Borowitz' fictional characters. He had no choice but to use "she" when he wrote about an actual female, but even his oft-quoted Tracy Klugian, despite having a first name that is common for girls as well as boys, was always "he."

Today I noticed that Borowitz used "she" for Tracy Klugian. How refreshing! I then did a quick search on The New Yorker's website and found that so far in 2017 Tracy was "she" once - on July 31, 2017, "he" once - on Sept. 21, 2017, and without pronoun 4 times - on Jan. 22, Apr. 24, May 2 and May 4. By the way, on May 2, Tracy was a schoolkid as was Zach Dorrinson, no doubt the son of the fictional Harland. Zach was also quoted. Wonder why young Dorrinson wasn't Zelda or, to continue with unisex names and gender ambiguity, Pat, Leslie or Kim?

It was time to investigate the M/F data for Tracy. A 2007 yahoo best answer to the question whether Tracy is a boy's name or a girl's identified 7 famous people named Tracy, 4 male and 3 female. The famousbirthdays.com site's list of celebrity and celebrated Tracy Somethings included pictures for at least the first 12. The score there was 4 to 8, men to women.

The US Census publishes good data on names, too. On this page , you can scroll down to 'Popularity by Name' and enter a name, select male or female, and then choose how far back you want to go. The search automatically goes through 2016. I chose to start in the 1900s and got a bar chart showing all the years when the chosen name was among the top 1000. I looked at Tracy, both female and male. For most of the years between 1942 and 2004, Tracy was in the top 1000 names for girls, but it did not make the top 1000 before 1942 nor after 2004 when it was ranked 951 . In 1970, its high point, the rank was 10. Among boys, Tracy had a longer run but was overall much less popular. It was in the top 1000 for many of the years between 1900 and 1999 and in that last year it ranked 808th. Its high point was 1967 with a rank of 98. The question is close but on balance Tracy Klugian's preferred pronoun should really be "she."

In 2014 I added Carol Foyler to my personal list of favorite recycled names. I had discovered Carol when I revisited Borowitz' naming habits in response to a comment posted to my 2011 piece. (That writer had wondered about Borowitz' preference for the University of Minnesota.) Of course, Carol can also be a man's name but I haven't noticed Borowitz ever call Fowler "he." Carol is not in today's piece but was, sans pronoun, there with Tracy (gender M) on Sept. 21. A few days ago on Oct. 28, Carol had a husband but chose to leave him to have surgery alone in order to come to Washington and join the hopeful crowd outside Mueller's office after Friday's news. How big was that crowd? Andy writes that a policeman (a man not an officer whose pronoun was "he") thought it could reach a million, and added "We definitely didn’t see anything like this at the Inauguration.” Borowitz does seem to live in a man's (or mostly men, anyway) world, whether real or imaginary, but he does have a way with words.

If you haven't yet seen today's Borowitz piece, rest assured that it includes your old guy friends Dorrinson and Logsdon, this time a clinical psychologist at, yes, the University of Minnesota.

Ne-ner-nis - Rejected (Part 4) - LANGUAGE 04 [04a?]

Author's Note: Per Blogspot I last edited this post in February 2018 but left it as a draft. When I went to edit it today though, Blogspot says it was published on 1/31/2016.  However, when I click on the Permalink, the page is not found. I can't find it in my published posts either.  Nevertheless, the stats show 96 views. Well, I'll just publish it now, without further edits. FWIW. - RJM 12/14/23.

In three previous posts I have proposed NE-NER-NIS as neuter pronouns. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that several hundred lexicographers met to decide on the best neuter subject pronoun and they chose THEY. Needless to say, I think they are wrong, and THEY is wrong. Before ne-ner-nis disappears from the lexicon, I would like to eulogize it. Or rather as Marc Antony said, "I come to bury [them], not to praise [them]" but we know he meant the opposite.

Singular or plural?

They - the lexicographers, not the pronoun - decided that it was OK for THEY (the pronoun) to take a plural verb because YOU is also both singular and plural and takes a plural verb either way. Hmmm. There IS a difference. When you use YOU, the person(s) to whom you (the person not the pronoun) speak knows whether he, she or they (the YOU to whom you speak) is one or more than one. When you use THEY, the person(s) to whom you speak is different from the person(s) about whom you speak. He, she or they (the hearers) may not know whether he, she or they (the subject/object of your utterance) are one or more than one.

2. Because "he" was rejected for unknown or unspecified genders, and "she" was too new to some ears, many writers and speakers had schooled themselves to replace singular nouns with plural ones in order to use "they" thereafter. But that often led to ambiguity if there was another plural noun in the sentence. I discussed this in Ne-ner-nis (Part 2) (scroll down to "Natural Superiority"). Using "they" as a singular, makes the ambiguity a permanent feature of the language.

The Extinction Problem

As with natural species, these days we are losing words faster than we are gaining them. That is because when we use a word that has a specific meaning in place of another perfectly fine word with a different meaning, we lose the unique meaning of the first word and have to resort to multiple words to achieve what we had before done with a single one. (See The Reticent/Reluctant Hesitation).

The Veterinarian Problem

We need a neuter pronoun not only for transgender humans but also for animals. We also need one when (1) we speak of a human whose gender is unspecified, unknown or irrelevant and (2) it is logical to speak of that human in the singular. As to animals, the other inventor of ne-ner-nis, whose invention is independent of mine and preceded it by several years, was in fact a veterinarian named Dr. Al Lippart. If it's embarrassing and offensive to call Spot "he" when Spot is a "she" or vice versa, will it be better to call Spot "they"? I invite Dr. Al to weigh in on this question.

January 31, 2016, rev (minor) 7/13/16