What Are Your Perfumes’ Pronouns? – Undina’s Looking Glass
Both languages I grew up with were inflected and had a three-way noun-class system – or, simply put, gendered. When I started learning English, it took me a while to get used to calling all inanimate objects “it,” unless, of course, we were talking about ships, other vehicles or abstract concepts like Fortune or Justice.
Over the decades, it became second nature, and I stopped even thinking about a pen being “she” or a pencil being “he.” That is, until recently, when I noticed a trend on YouTube beauty channels: more and more often, creators refer to products with “she,” as in “She is gorgeous!” or “Just look how glowy she is!” while talking about lipsticks, eyeshadows or blushes. It still sounds unnatural to me, but what do I know?
Saturday Question #277:
What Are Your Perfumes’ Pronouns?
When you think about perfumes, what pronoun do you use?
My Answer
In my native language, the situation was slightly illogical. The word духи (dukhi), a native Slavic word with deep etymology that referred to women’s perfume, existed only in the plural – and therefore had no grammatical gender. That didn’t stop everyone from understanding that the product was strictly feminine.
The masculine counterpart, одеколон (odekolon), meaning cologne, was grammatically masculine and, unsurprisingly, intended for men. Interestingly, that word was a loan from French (eau de Cologne), adapted phonetically.
Years of talking, writing, and thinking about perfume in English have taught me that fragrances are genderless usage-wise and definitely inanimate grammatically. So for me, even my absolute favorites, the ones I adore and never want to be without, will always be “it” (in every sense of the word).
How about you?
What Are Your Perfumes’ Pronouns?