The Pronoun Game
19 Mar 2009 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneAnother version of the pronoun game is the "life-partner" game. IE, what do you call yours?
When Wax and I first hooked up, I struggled a lot more with this. It's not just a matter of the pronoun game: I didn't want to call her my "girlfriend" to people who already knew about her, or who at least knew that I was gay, either. It's less to do with pronouns in this case and more to do with my lack of satisfaction with the available terms.
Our society has a surprisingly limited range of formal, semi-formal, and business-casual terms for one's life partner. In American English it's pretty much "husband/wife" or "girlfriend/boyfriend". There's also the word "partner", which fits into any setting besides legal documentation with approximately the ease of a bull in a china shop.
My grandfather and step-grandmother, after cohabiting since before my dad even graduated from college, only got married a few years ago. At that point they'd been together over twenty years, and they only bothered with the legal formality because it significantly simplified some of the legal papers and things they needed on retiring and moving halfway across the country. For most of my life, I was forced to play the life-partner game ON BEHALF OF MY GRANDFATHER. My choices were "My grandpa's girlfriend", "My grandpa's common-law wife", or "My grandfather's, well, she's like his second wife, except they're not married, but they've been together for twenty years." Seriously, modern conversational English? Seriously?
My grandpa and step-grandma could afford to ignore it because they were both employed full-time and owned their house, but the fact is that in America, there's a substantial financial incentive to wed, especially if you have children, in the form of tax breaks. That's not the case in the Northern European welfare states (our model is different from the UK's - it's not European but Northern European here): each income is always taxed separately; social services are always given out separately, including universal healthcare, which means partner health benefits are rare (if they exist?); and a common-law marriage exists after a certain period of cohabitation (for purposes of calculating household income in case of unemployment, housing assistance, govt childcare subsidies etc) even if the partner is a same-sex foreign national (that's why I now qualify for Finnish social security). The legal benefits conferred by marriage (or 'registered partnership' - legally the same, but the distinction exists because Finland has a state Lutheran church which officially disapproves of teh gays) are essentially confined to a) death (inheritances), b) power of attorney, and c) citizenship (the process of application is probably still a little thick - I've never really investigated it, because citizenship itself wouldn't confer any benefit aside from the legal right to live, work, and receive social benefits in the rest of the EU: so if we decided we wanted to move out of Finland, that's basically the only time it could be useful).
Across the US and Western Europe, divorce rates have been increasing for decades. I think it's something above a third of marriages that end in divorce, right? There's significant sociological research on this subject. And marriage rates have fallen sharply. In the EU even more than the US, cohabitation is gaining substantial ground on marriage. Many heterosexual couples forego the formality entirely, and even if they don't, several years of cohabitation prior to marriage is the growing norm. It's been the subject of a memorable episode a few years ago of the US National Public Radio show "A Way with Words", where "language experts" (writer/journalists, I think they actually were, although one of the new hosts is a linguist) discuss modern language issues with guests and call-ins: these are modern heterosexual US yuppies struggling for a graceful way to say "cohabiting partner" in conversation.
The Scandinavian tongues don't have these problems. Casual Swedish not only tends towards the expressions "my man/woman" and "my spouse/partner", it also contains the sexuality- and gender-neutral noun "cohabitor" (that's a literal translation of sambo which, however, specifically refers to a cohabiting partner, never a roommate). (Finnish actually only has only one pronoun for 'he/she', requiring you to go out of your way a bit to specify gender, which causes some hilarity sometimes, like when Wax kept trying to come out to her clueless work acquaintance a few years ago who just couldn't get that I wasn't a dude.)
Now, there are dialects that allow at least for synonyms for "girlfriend/boyfriend" like "boo", which Wax and I use frequently. There are outmoded expressions like "gentleman friend" (which I think I saw Miss Manners advocate recently) and "better half", which I currently favour ironically. None of these are appropriate for, uh, business-casual or formal occasions, however. They won't do for a conversation with your boss or an interview at the Employment Bureau. In Finland, where "partner" is understood by both Finns and Swedish-speaking Finns as the English translation of the Finnish and Swedish terms they're familiar with, I need feel no compunction other than the aesthetic. I know, at least, that it won't introduce social awkwardness, and that for purposes of employment, or interaction with the government, I don't have to play the pronoun game because I have legal equality.
But I think part of the problem is that "partner" can still be ambiguous in English, depending on the context. While it is recognisable as shorthand for "life partner", we've all read the buddy-cop slash fics where it's not clear whether they're professional or personal partners in some conversation or other. (This is in fact the foundation of the buddy cop genre, but a) I digress and b) we all knew that, anyway.) But "life partner" sounds twee in a candle-lighting manner - like an artificially-constructed euphemism. At least "my other half" (and "my better half", which is probably a playful or inexcusably sappy take-off of the former expression) seems to more accurately convey the weight of a life-partnership, but its flowery connotations can't be fully stripped away: it's fit for playful and ironic usage, or possibly if you really like purple prose and can keep a straight face through it for romantic usage (see the other half of his soul), but it's not really fit for all casual conversations, because you don't always want to introduce irony or humour when you're talking about your life-partner. And I guess the solution in realistic terms of language change would just be to claim "partner" by making the usage of it so widespread that it took the place of "sambo" in Swedish, but since its other uses are hardly going to die out... I don't know: I don't like it. On the other hand, I can hardly advocate for "boo". I mean, I could, but there's no way that's going to happen.
When Wax and I first hooked up, I struggled a lot more with this. It's not just a matter of the pronoun game: I didn't want to call her my "girlfriend" to people who already knew about her, or who at least knew that I was gay, either. It's less to do with pronouns in this case and more to do with my lack of satisfaction with the available terms.
Our society has a surprisingly limited range of formal, semi-formal, and business-casual terms for one's life partner. In American English it's pretty much "husband/wife" or "girlfriend/boyfriend". There's also the word "partner", which fits into any setting besides legal documentation with approximately the ease of a bull in a china shop.
My grandfather and step-grandmother, after cohabiting since before my dad even graduated from college, only got married a few years ago. At that point they'd been together over twenty years, and they only bothered with the legal formality because it significantly simplified some of the legal papers and things they needed on retiring and moving halfway across the country. For most of my life, I was forced to play the life-partner game ON BEHALF OF MY GRANDFATHER. My choices were "My grandpa's girlfriend", "My grandpa's common-law wife", or "My grandfather's, well, she's like his second wife, except they're not married, but they've been together for twenty years." Seriously, modern conversational English? Seriously?
My grandpa and step-grandma could afford to ignore it because they were both employed full-time and owned their house, but the fact is that in America, there's a substantial financial incentive to wed, especially if you have children, in the form of tax breaks. That's not the case in the Northern European welfare states (our model is different from the UK's - it's not European but Northern European here): each income is always taxed separately; social services are always given out separately, including universal healthcare, which means partner health benefits are rare (if they exist?); and a common-law marriage exists after a certain period of cohabitation (for purposes of calculating household income in case of unemployment, housing assistance, govt childcare subsidies etc) even if the partner is a same-sex foreign national (that's why I now qualify for Finnish social security). The legal benefits conferred by marriage (or 'registered partnership' - legally the same, but the distinction exists because Finland has a state Lutheran church which officially disapproves of teh gays) are essentially confined to a) death (inheritances), b) power of attorney, and c) citizenship (the process of application is probably still a little thick - I've never really investigated it, because citizenship itself wouldn't confer any benefit aside from the legal right to live, work, and receive social benefits in the rest of the EU: so if we decided we wanted to move out of Finland, that's basically the only time it could be useful).
Across the US and Western Europe, divorce rates have been increasing for decades. I think it's something above a third of marriages that end in divorce, right? There's significant sociological research on this subject. And marriage rates have fallen sharply. In the EU even more than the US, cohabitation is gaining substantial ground on marriage. Many heterosexual couples forego the formality entirely, and even if they don't, several years of cohabitation prior to marriage is the growing norm. It's been the subject of a memorable episode a few years ago of the US National Public Radio show "A Way with Words", where "language experts" (writer/journalists, I think they actually were, although one of the new hosts is a linguist) discuss modern language issues with guests and call-ins: these are modern heterosexual US yuppies struggling for a graceful way to say "cohabiting partner" in conversation.
The Scandinavian tongues don't have these problems. Casual Swedish not only tends towards the expressions "my man/woman" and "my spouse/partner", it also contains the sexuality- and gender-neutral noun "cohabitor" (that's a literal translation of sambo which, however, specifically refers to a cohabiting partner, never a roommate). (Finnish actually only has only one pronoun for 'he/she', requiring you to go out of your way a bit to specify gender, which causes some hilarity sometimes, like when Wax kept trying to come out to her clueless work acquaintance a few years ago who just couldn't get that I wasn't a dude.)
Now, there are dialects that allow at least for synonyms for "girlfriend/boyfriend" like "boo", which Wax and I use frequently. There are outmoded expressions like "gentleman friend" (which I think I saw Miss Manners advocate recently) and "better half", which I currently favour ironically. None of these are appropriate for, uh, business-casual or formal occasions, however. They won't do for a conversation with your boss or an interview at the Employment Bureau. In Finland, where "partner" is understood by both Finns and Swedish-speaking Finns as the English translation of the Finnish and Swedish terms they're familiar with, I need feel no compunction other than the aesthetic. I know, at least, that it won't introduce social awkwardness, and that for purposes of employment, or interaction with the government, I don't have to play the pronoun game because I have legal equality.
But I think part of the problem is that "partner" can still be ambiguous in English, depending on the context. While it is recognisable as shorthand for "life partner", we've all read the buddy-cop slash fics where it's not clear whether they're professional or personal partners in some conversation or other. (This is in fact the foundation of the buddy cop genre, but a) I digress and b) we all knew that, anyway.) But "life partner" sounds twee in a candle-lighting manner - like an artificially-constructed euphemism. At least "my other half" (and "my better half", which is probably a playful or inexcusably sappy take-off of the former expression) seems to more accurately convey the weight of a life-partnership, but its flowery connotations can't be fully stripped away: it's fit for playful and ironic usage, or possibly if you really like purple prose and can keep a straight face through it for romantic usage (see the other half of his soul), but it's not really fit for all casual conversations, because you don't always want to introduce irony or humour when you're talking about your life-partner. And I guess the solution in realistic terms of language change would just be to claim "partner" by making the usage of it so widespread that it took the place of "sambo" in Swedish, but since its other uses are hardly going to die out... I don't know: I don't like it. On the other hand, I can hardly advocate for "boo". I mean, I could, but there's no way that's going to happen.
(no subject)
Date: 19 Mar 2009 10:20 pm (UTC)