From "Nauseous" to Nonbinary: My Breakup with Linguistic Orthodoxy

I grew up in a language-rich environment. I lived part-time with each of my parents for as long as I could remember, and they both valued verbal fluency, proper grammar, and good writing. My father, an English professor, was a particularly strict ideologue when it came to our use of language. I reached maturity knowing the “correct” way to use specific words and to eschew newfangled usages that were, he instructed, simply wrong.

One of his favorite examples: Nauseous (“And this is not a negotiation, Vanessa!”) meant “causing nausea; offensive; nauseating.” He was right. In the 60s and 70s, dictionaries did NOT include the meaning that people everywhere used despite its absence from the vocab canon: “affected with nausea.” If I wanted to throw up and said I was nauseous, he’d correct me before holding my hair while I barfed.

Fast forward. When I was teaching, that word appeared in a book my class was reading. The usage was the “correct” meaning, one my students had never even heard of. Lo and behold, by the time those same kids were in college, every dictionary included the common-usage meaning, which is now listed first. Turns out, the word was used that way as early as the 17th century, but only “radical” dictionary authors deigned to include it until the tide became a tsunami a couple centuries later. One day, the original “correct” definition will probably be listed as archaic.

I think my father drew a line in the sand after the critically important pivot point known as William Shakespeare. He clearly gave this literary and linguistic genius a pass. After all, Will introduced nearly 2000 new words into our lexicon. I’m thinking, at that point, Dad was done acknowledging the ongoing creative journey that is language. In his mind, I guess the English language had hit maximum occupancy or something.

My point is, language is a living thing. As you, of course, know. I am still incredulous that my very smart father actually believed that what the dictionaries in his study said about English language definitions and usage was the culmination of linguistic evolution and therefore the final truth. Correctness had been achieved, and there was no looking back.

Or forward.

Well then, how do you explain the word “humongous,” Dad?

There are a bunch of stories about the etymology of this oh-so common and accepted word. One is that a high school English class decided to coin a new word, used it obsessively everywhere they went—and it worked. Another is that humongous was invented by a clever fellow in a college fraternity, where it was used in an advertisement for a party. There is a Princeton alumni newsletter that printed it in an article in 1969. It was in fairly common usage by 1970. By the 1980s, it had made its way into the official vocab canon.

A word that did not even exist when I was born was in mainstream dictionaries when I was teaching English in my late 20s and 30s. If that’s not cool, I don’t know what is.

One of the most beneficial modifications of the English language is also very recent. The vice-like grip that gendered pronouns have had on writing and speaking has finally loosened. Any language that derives from Sanskrit or Proto-Germanic or Hellenic or Latin language roots uses nouns and pronouns that are designated feminine, masculine, and in some cases neuter. English, which has root tendrils in all of those ancient source languages, has rid itself of most gendered nouns, though some people love to distinguish woman actors from the men, or let certain words default to the masculine, like fireman. I have pretty much always refused to use words like actress, heroine, waitress, or policeman. We long ago did away with aviatrix, and now we need to kick princess, hostess, and mailman to the curb. To name a few.

But those pesky pronouns.

As an editor and writer, I am very familiar with the pretzel-twisting required to make a sentence grammatically accurate when using singular, gendered pronouns—without resorting to “she/he.” In the past, of course, all pronouns for which there was no designated antecedent defaulted to the masculine. Countless articles, books, and advertisements where “human” equated to “he, him, his” unless otherwise specified. Ugh.

But we have moved on. Well, not everyone, obviously, but it has become commonly accepted among writers, editors, and publishers to use “they” as the gender-neutral pronoun. This is a wholly good thing, not only in terms of human dignity and civil rights but also clarity of expression.

My ideas about the magical fluidity of language and the way that everyday, normal people can simply decide what a word means are just some of the ways I have veered far afield from some of my father’s more rigid dictates about “how life is.” He was unteasable on this subject, alas.

I’m not going to lie. This linguistic revolution (the neutral use of the plural third person pronoun) was a heavy lift for me at first, not because I did not support the rights of nonbinary people (or any person who so chose) to be freed from the cruelty of inaccurate labeling. It was simply a deeply entrenched habit. But like so many habits that are based in “but that’s how we’ve always done it,” or rooted in implicit bias, or simply the result of a vast degree of ignorance, it was one I had to break no matter what.

I’m not proud of how long it took me to not feel my finger twitch on the keyboard whenever I was editing a document that used “they” in the singular. It’s been a long long time since I felt that twitch. The liberation I feel is enormous.