A bright red beetle

Steve Schwartzman

Apr 30

On April 22nd I went over to the other side of Great Hills Park to see whether any Mexican hats, Ratibida columnifera, had already come up this spring in a place where I'd found them in other years. Some had. On one of them I couldn't help noticing an insect that Robert Androw at bugguide.net has identified as the longhorn beetle Batyle suturalis. I'd identified it as a bright red beetle, which shows the difference in our entomological skills. When it comes to etymology, though, our roles are most likely reversed, with probably few if any of the good folks at bugguide.net knowing that the English word beetle is related to bite.

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We recently subscribed to New Scientist, a magazine published in London that comes out weekly, and with such a frequent publication schedule provides lots of articles about science. As expected of a magazine from Britain, more of its stories involve that country than would be the case in a magazine published in another country; even so, most of its articles report findings from all over the world.

The other day I was reading the April 15th issue and came to the Views column, in which Annalee Newitz wrote a piece about finding a new home online after giving up on Twitter. Who is the writer? The magazine includes a small photograph showing an androgynous-looking person, beneath which is a blurb that begins: "Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest novel is The Terrafarmers...."

Presumably the possessive pronoun their is to alert us that Annalee Newitz "identifies as" "non-binary" or "gender nonconforming" or "gender-fluid" or "gender-queer" or something similar. Now, that their is not the their that English has long used as a generic pronoun when we're not thinking of a specific person and therefore can't specify a gender. Here's an example from Thackeray's 1848 novel Vanity Fair: "'A person can't help their birth,' Rosalind replied with great liberality." That usage has become more common in recent years, and probably few people would now think it strange to hear the advice that in the event of an airplane crash, each passenger exiting the plane should leave their belongings behind. We know that each passenger is either a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, but because we're thinking of all the passengers on the plane, we're okay with using a plural pronoun.

However, when referring to one specific person, English has always used either he or she, him or her, his or her. For example: "When Madeleine got out of the burning plane, she left her bag behind." We would not traditionally say "Madeleine left their bag behind," though I grant you a few people have started saying things like that.

In any case, as I started reading Annalee Newitz's column I couldn't help noticing how the second sentence began: "I abandoned my account last November...." After the magazine went out of its way to indicate that we should refer to Annalee as they, I had the strong feeling that Annalee should have written "We abandoned our account...." Presumably Annalee would argue that Annalee, though of no particular gender or of several genders, is still just one person, and therefore the singular I and my are appropriate. That leaves us with the situation in which people who refer to Annalee are supposed to use the plural pronoun they, but Annalee can still use the singular pronouns I and my. Ah, my foolish mind, looking for consistency in all the wrong places.