‘Yo’ Said What?

By Rebecca Hersher, Code Switch

“Over the past few decades, we’ve made a lot of changes in the English language to make it more gender neutral. We say ‘police officer’ instead of ‘policeman,’ and ‘people’ instead of ‘mankind.’

But there’s one thing we can’t seem to get right: pronouns. We know that if you say, ‘Every child has his monkey,’ it excludes girls. So instead we might say, ‘Every child has their monkey,’ even though it’s not grammatically correct. And ‘Every child has his or her monkey,’ is just clunky.

But some kids in Baltimore have come up with a solution that has caught the attention of linguists.

At the UMAR Boxing Gym, you hear the word ‘yo’ a lot.”

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