You see them below the signature line on emails more and more these days: a person’s preferred pronouns.
There are the familiar ones — she, her, hers and he, him, his. But the use of "they" is becoming more common as a singular gender nonbinary pronoun.
In his new book, “What’s Your Pronoun: Beyond He and She," linguistics scholar Dennis Baron recounts the centuries' long search for a gender-neutral pronoun.
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"What we are trying to do is get people to respect one another and to include one another in the conversation whether it's spoken or written," Baron said. "It's a politeness issue. It's a civility issue. It's a way to say, 'I'm listening to you by using those pronouns.'"
Baron joined Midday Edition on Monday to talk about English's old pronoun problem.
