Introduction

Summary

“I think she's got it!” exclaimed a participant at the American Dialect Society's annual meeting in January 2000, after the final vote for the “Word of the Millennium.” The early candidates for the honor ranged from the lofty (truth, freedom, justice) to the academic (science), from the political (government) to the seemingly mundane (the). The debate was heated, with members concerned whether the vote was based on the words themselves or on the concepts that the words represented. Rather late in the discussion, the word she was proffered and it quickly began to gain momentum – perhaps oddly parallel to what she seems to have done in medieval times when it entered the language. She gathered support from all sides: she represents a linguistic innovation of this millennium (she is first cited in 1154 AD); the introduction of she is change at the very core of the English vocabulary; the mysterious origins of she seem best explained as a combination of distinctive phonological processes in English and the effects of language contact, a crucial force in the history of English; she as a feminine linguistic marker represents a fundamental social category and its ascendance can be seen as symbolic of the gains by women at the end of the millennium; and she allows us to celebrate the pronoun, a type of mundane function word that tends to get taken for granted, albeit a critical linguistic building block. And she did get it.