Thon

The sources cannot agree on his middle name. Wikipedia calls him Charles Crosby Converse and Wiktionary calls him Charles Crozat Converse, while the two articles he signed appear as C. C. Converse and C. Crozat Converse. Nothing else about the coinage is in doubt.

How thon declines and where thonself appears

Wiktionary marks the set nonstandard and rare, and the paradigm it supports is short. The subject and the object are the same word, coordinate with he and she in one position and with him and her in the other, and the only derived forms the dictionary lists are thons and thonself. No source traced for this entry attests an independent possessive, so the fourth column below repeats the determiner rather than adding a form nobody has recorded.

Wiktionary lists singular they and singular them as the synonyms of the two pronoun senses, and it lists he, she, him and her as the hyponyms, which is to say that the dictionary treats the gendered sets as the narrower terms sitting under the general one. That is exactly the relation Converse claimed for his coinage, and no dictionary has ever printed it about they.

The attested sentences show the forms working together. Henry Graham Williams, in the third edition of his Outlines of Psychology of 1895, wrote that every student should acquaint thonself with some method by which thon can positively correlate the facts of thons knowledge, which puts three of the five forms in one clause. Converse's own example of the object form, from 1884, is a sentence in which the antecedent is spelled out: if Mr. or Mrs. A. comes to the courthouse on Monday next, the writer will be there to meet thon.

Where thon came from before Converse borrowed it

Thon was already an English word. Wikipedia describes it as originally a Scots version of yon, meaning that or that one, and Wiktionary keeps that sense as a separate entry, an adjective with its own pronunciation, glossed simply as yon.

The demonstrative is still written. Wiktionary's citations for it are recent and both are Scots-inflected dialogue in novels: Diana Gabaldon's A Breath of Snow and Ashes, in the edition of 2010, where a mother notices her son taking a third peek out thon window, and Allie Mackay's Must Love Kilts of 2011, where a man is told to look in the shadows of thon window embrasure. The pronoun and the demonstrative have coexisted for a century and a half without either displacing the other, largely because they circulate in different places.

Why Converse wanted a word like thon

The titles of his two published arguments carry the case. The first, in The Critic and Good Literature of 23 July 1884, is called A New Pronoun. The second, in The Writer of November 1889, is called That Desired Impersonal Pronoun, and desired is the operative word: Converse presented himself as supplying something the language was already short of rather than something he had thought of wanting.

His pitch in the second piece is modest to the point of self-deprecation. Every writer, he wrote, has thons verbal likes and dislikes, and he trusted that even thon who dislikes verbal innovations would give his little word a little trial and report the result. The sentence is also a demonstration, since it uses both the possessive and the subject form of the word it is asking for.

How thon entered a dictionary and left it

The word was added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 1934 and removed from it in 1961. That is a longer run in a major dictionary than any other coined English pronoun achieves in the sources traced for this entry, and the removal is the only part of the story most accounts leave out.

It is in a dictionary now as well. Wiktionary carries thon with four dated quotations and thonself with four more, marking the first nonstandard and rare and the second archaic and nonstandard. Nothing in the sources traced for this entry explains the removal, or names anybody who argued for it, which is a gap of the same kind as the missing evidence for the coinage catching on. Scholarly notice outlasted the Merriam-Webster entry: American Speech published a piece by Quidnunc called Thon, That's the Forewho in its Autumn and Winter double issue of 1973, twelve years after the dictionary dropped the word.

Where thon was actually printed

The attested uses are few, dated and unusually varied in register. The Chataquan of June 1885 has a line about each member of a local circle being expected to inform thonself on an allotted topic. W. J. McGee used thonself in The Seri Indians, published in the Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1898, writing that neither man nor maid mates for thonself. A journal of orthoepy and orthography printed a passage in August 1907 in a reformed spelling of its own, using thon and thonself throughout a sentence about every soul having the power to make heaven or hell for itself. That placement says something about the company the word kept: it survived longest among people who were already trying to reform English in some other way, and the sentence carrying it is barely legible in ordinary spelling.

The most recent citation on file is the odd one. William Zinsser used the word four times in the third edition of On Writing Well, in 1985, in order to say that he doubted the average American wanted it in the language or would ever use it thonself.

Why a coined pronoun is not a recent thing

Converse was neither first nor last. Wikipedia's account of the coined pronouns has William H. Marshall recording the use of ou as far back as 1789, and dates ze to at least 1864, six years after thon. In 1911 an insurance broker named Fred Pond invented the set he'er, his'er and him'er; the superintendent of the Chicago public-school system proposed adopting it in 1912, which set off a national argument in the United States, and heer was added to the Funk and Wagnalls dictionary in 1913. The Sacramento Bee used hir for twenty-five years, from the 1920s to the 1940s. Mary Orovan invented co and coself in 1970, and the Twin Oaks Community in Virginia was still using them in 2011. Kate Bornstein used ze and hir for a character in the novel Nearly Roadkill in 1996, and the Oxford English Dictionary added ze in 2018 and hir and zir in 2019.

The collective word for these is younger than any of them: Wikipedia dates the term neopronoun to the 2010s. So is the survey evidence. The Trevor Project's online survey of 2020 found that four per cent of the LGBTQ young people it reached, aged thirteen to twenty-four, used a coined pronoun of some kind, a share of a self-selected sample rather than of any general population.

Against that stretch of record, singular they is the older option and thon is the older coinage. Wikipedia also records the argument running inside the communities concerned as well as outside them, with objections raised by Non-binary and transgender people as well as by cisgender ones, and with supporters describing coined sets as useful to people who have not found an existing one that fits.