Angulowl

     Our late troubles with the epicene pronouns he, his, him, and himself⎯ by which males and females are referred to ambivalently⎯have stemmed from the fact that here are codewords that we cannot distinguish enough from personal pronouns referring exclusively to males.  Indeed, the two kinds of pronouns, although different in function, take identical form. Consequently, 'the epicene he' met with a storm of protest during the women's movement of the 1960s and 70s.  Feminists denounced it as sexist language that collaborates in a long patriarchal history of rendering women invisible and dependent on men.  We have since seen the emergence of a spate of alternative epicene constructions:  he or she, they, s/he⎯to list but a few.  All of these are stylistically inferior to he.

     Before the feminist intervention, usage of the epicene he was hardly controversial.  The grammatical rule of having English pronouns agree with their antecedents in number had been formulated by maverick philologists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  These lovers of the vernacular language prescribed epicenes that reproduced the beauty of Latin verbal concord.  They also wanted to fully tap the verbal economy of English masculine pronouns.  The epicene subject-pronoun he not only possessed the force of few letters, though.  It also imitated onomatopoeically our living and breathing presence as humans.  Thus the American linguist William S. Cardell, in his Philosophic Grammar of the English Language (1827), was led to speculate that "breath, and to breathe" are "imitative of that animal exercise, and equivalent to he, hai, ho, hah, heh, as written by different nations, or to the sound of our letter h or he, the 'mark of aspiration or strong breathing'''.

     Our modern problem of the epicene he now finds an ideal remedy in 'the epicene hu'. Pronounced with a short u sound, the word conserves the stylistic virtues of the epicene he.  Yet it is truly sex-neutral.  Phonetically, it is not quite he and not quite her.  Visually, its characters are those of the first syllable of human.

     Its usage is showcased in a scholarly essay volume on political history, The Political Imagination in History: Essays concerning J.G.A. Pocock (2007).  Herein we read, for example:

•      Utility, to be sure, lies in the eye of the scholar and depends almost entirely on hu        notions of aim and feasibility (p. 54). 

•      In the modern notion of the "individual" we refer to a subject whose independence        and autonomy are a function of hu freedom from the state ...(p. 96).

•      The risk is that of ventriloquizing a satirist's fiction and tropes, such as hu gloomy         and shocking exaggerations or hu self-proclaimed role of ethical hero (p. 134).

•      [T]he historian is immersed in the flow of time that also forms hu subject matter...        The historian's present therefore becomes important to hu understanding of the            past (pp. 175-76).

The volume emerged under the auspices of The Archangul Foundation, a philological organization committed to using learned discourse for the purpose of reforming the English language.

     This newly prescribed hu functions with versatility in epicene contexts, in the capacities of subject- , object- , and possessive-pronoun.  But too, there is huself.  And add apostrophe s  to the stand-alone possessives.  In the future, the epicene hu may even substitute for our un-coded personal pronouns, should we proceed much further in the direction of cultivating sex-neutral spheres of existence.