Macmillan Holdings, LLC. Grammar Girl, Grammar Girl's, QDnow, and Quick and Dirty Tips are all trademarks of Macmillan Holdings, LLC. Researchers discover that kids are using "yo" as a slang pronoun. Eric grammar This could be way off, but I'm reminded of how Irish people will use "your man" instead of "he" or "him" or "that person" in sentences. "Your man over there has a new coat." "Watch out for your man with the angry look." Maybe this use of "yo" in Baltimore derived from a similar use of "your [person]"? http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59937#Comments http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59937#Comments Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:59:21 GMT Ivan Chesnokov grammar The third-person plural personal pronouns are terrible when used as a third-person neuter personal pronoun system, because such use further confounds an already ambiguous sentence by introducing NUMERICAL ambiguity where the only ambiguity the speaker calls for is with regard to gender. The loss of the gendered pronouns would not be a major injury to the English language. About the only case where they add to the efficiency of communication is in passages discussing an individual male and an individual female, where these pronouns allow rapid designation of one or the other. We already lack gendered plural pronouns, and get by without issue using "they"/"them"/"their"/"theirs" whenever we are discussing groups, whether they be of all females, all males, or a mixture of the two. Conscripting these plural pronouns to also serve a singular role leaves us with no unambiguous way to distinguish an individual from a group. Make no mistake: the third person plural personal pronouns are by no means an effective solution to the gender-neutral singular personal pronoun question, regardless of their persistence in the Modern English canon. On the contrary, the dire need for a third-person singular personal pronoun system is all the more clear if speakers are risking numerical ambiguity merely to speed a sentence along. Of course, speakers and writers taking the time to use "he or she" cry out for such pronouns even more overtly. The kids in Baltimore grew tired of waiting for English to fix this long-standing syntax bug and simply supplied their own solution. To continue offering the poor substitute "they" will only delay the inevitable rise of contracted forms of "he or she", "him or her", "his or her" and "his or hers". English speakers should seek to speed the development of these contractions with an eye to their formal acceptance, rather than clinging desperately to a history of numerical ambiguity in "they" that has never even been a unanimously accepted form. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59807#Comments http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59807#Comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 02:49:17 GMT Saoirse grammar What's the problem with using "they" as a singular? (this is addressed to commenters) Not only has it been used as a singular pronoun for hundreds of years, it is also contradictory to say it should "only be used as a plural". "You" is used for both singular and plural, and it isn't conjugated differently in either context. Do you hear anyone complaining? Is it really more important to cling on to reactionary prescriptivism than make language more convenient for gender-unknown and/or gender-neutral people? Languages naturally change, that's the end of it. Fascinating article, by the way! http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59803#Comments http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59803#Comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 01:40:18 GMT J grammar I, personally, have never been a fan of 'they' and 'them', as both words usually signify a plural, and when referring to a singular strikes me as completely backwards, so I welcome our new 'Yo' overlords. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59708#Comments http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59708#Comments Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:05:40 GMT Curtis grammar I remember my cousins from Baltimore having used "Joe" in a similar fashion, probably back in the mid '90s or so. I wonder if the term evolved because one could easily interpret Joe as gendered male? http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59703#Comments http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59703#Comments Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:28:27 GMT Stacy grammar Good for the kids. It is a glaring failing of proper English that there is no gender neutral third person singluar pronoun. Drives me nuts as a writer, as I often encounter a situation in which I need exactly such a pronoun. The language is a living thing; I hope this particular usage finds its way into the mainstream. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59666#Comments http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59666#Comments Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:31:19 GMT Kaja grammar Timothy, you speak of gender respect, but that's a more complicated issue than you're making it out to be. You name chromosome as a criteria for determining gender identity, but that doesn't really work 100% reliably even if you discount transgender people. There're people most would identity as male or female that just happened to have the opposite chromosomes of their visible gender. As for the whole transgender issue, people can disagree with having the gender assigned to them at birth or even with having a gender at all. Plus, you don't necessarily always know someone's gender (this is especially true online). There're plenty of cases where people might need to refer to someone they only know as a screenname. That said, 'yo' is a pretty informal slang term and not always appropriate (as Grammar Girl mentioned in fact). http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59648#Comments http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59648#Comments Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:01:49 GMT Timothy grammar I find it disturbing that society is so fearful of providing gender respect (I know, the word respect is over used) through the use of both the proper pronoun and abiding by simple rules of grammar. Why must we abdicate rules just because children, especially those still enrolled in the educational process, find/discover/invent a shortcut around the rules? The animated character mentioned in the experiment/study should have been referred to as an "it" inasmuch as it was created simply to engage the watcher and not having any chromosome to identify it as he or she. As an educator, if a child pointed to an individual in a room containing other individuals and that child used the term "yo" to try to convey a message about the second child, my first response would be "Who?" thereby encouraging the speaker to use either a proper name or proper pronoun. To accept the term "yo" as sufficiently intelligible to indicate a specific person has the same effect as the tail that wags the dog. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59647#Comments http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59647#Comments Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:23:14 GMT Wayne Philips grammar Yo is simply a generic word. Kids think it's cool to slaughter the English language. Yo is an old 80s word from rap. Yo is the subject of the sentence. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59646#Comments http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59646#Comments Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:17:09 GMT Christos Karras grammar I don't understand the sentence examples. Is "I wearing"/"he wearing"/"you wearing" valid english? (Shouldn't it be "I AM wearing"/"you ARE wearing"/"he IS wearing")? Why would "[another-pronoun] wearing" be valid then? I think a more plausible interpretation is that "yo" is an extreme contradiction of "you're": "you're wearing", now that makes sense. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59619#Comments http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx?commentid=59619#Comments Sun, 10 Mar 2013 23:22:13 GMT Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:59:21 GMT http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx feedback@quickanddirtytips.com (Managing Editor) feedback@quickanddirtytips.com (Webmaster) en-us