At some point early on in my son’s life (I think he was about 3), I suddenly realised with a horrified shock that I had entirely forgotten to use any actual pronouns in his presence— OMG, Of course he needs pronouns! How on earth is he going to learn proper language if I don’t ever use pronouns in front of him? — In my defense, I think I had implicitly intuited that somehow pronouns were deeply complicated, and that his young,  developing language capacities were not yet ready for those mysteries.  That even innocuous sentences like “I am going to wash my hands now. Do you need to wash your hands, baby?’’ presented deep philosophical problems of authorship, conversation and ego,   leading to shifting  reference that went way beyond the point-and-shoot index-finger  labelling strategy that had been the foundation of our mutual world exploration up until that point. As a retreat from the philosophical abyss I sensed in the yawning maw of the pronoun I , I had resorted to referring to myself with the referentially rigid name (in the world of my son)  Mamma. (“Mamma’s going to wash her hands now. Does Vidar need to wash hands? ‘’) That is, up until the aforementioned moment of horrified realisation,  when I knew I had to finally put aside such childish things and introduce him to the proper functioning of I, you, he, she, they and us. Now, many years later¹, I continue to be  impressed by the flexibility and utility of pronouns, as well as the mysteries of  I and you  in  contrast with the clunky wordy literal-minded ness of actual names.  But here, I put aside the alluring shiftiness of the pronouns I and you to concentrate on the underappreciated ordinariness of he, she, it and they which perform important functions as foot soldiers of discourse coherence every day of our lives. To illustrate, imagine a narrative in which I wish to describe the activities of a hypothetical creature, known to us both as Thilo, who is preparing for a summer gathering: 

• (1) “Thilo took a quick shower as the sky darkened in the west, and he briefly thought about what shirt he would wear to dinner.’’  

The pronouns he  in the previous sentence are unambiguous in this context in that they clearly (both) refer to Thilo. Moreover, pronouns here are highly preferable to simply re-using the name Thilo: 

• (2) “Thilo took a quick shower as the sky darkened in the west, and Thilo briefly thought about what shirt Thilo would wear to dinner.’’ 

 which would be awkward and ugly,  and grate on the ear of any  English speaker². The pronoun solution  in (1) is the perfect design choice here for a smooth sounding transparently comprehensible output.  But pronouns are not always perfect either, since the presence of more than one male animate participant in the discourse can lead to uncertainty.

• (3) “Thilo called up Magnus on the phone as the sky darkened in the west, and he cast doubt on the wisdom of driving into town in the middle of a snow storm,  even though it was  his birthday.’’

Since Thilo and Magnus are both presumably male (in a language and culture where certain names are associated with certain pronouns by default), it is very unclear who the  worrier is in this case (the caller or the callee), and more interestingly whose birthday is it anyway? 

So in avoiding the unimaginative and hamfisted repetition of Proper Names which guarantees comprehension at the expense of art, we rely instead on the reassuringly open ended place-holder of the pronoun, whose information content is so reduced that repetition is innocuous, but with increased risk of misunderstanding if our interlocutor is not perfectly attuned to our thoughts.  An utterance like the one in (3)  in fact,  likely occurs in a context where it is perfectly well known to both conversants that it is e.g. Magnus’  birthday (not Thilo’s), and the speaker even has the possibility of subtly finessing the syntactic context to nail down the identity of the `worrier’  by making the second clause non-finite, whose subject is then unambiguously interpreted as Thilo: 

(3’)  “Thilo called up Magnus on the phone as the sky darkened in the west,  to  cast doubt on the wisdom of driving into town in the middle of a snow storm,  even though it was  his birthday.’’

So with suitable reliance on a background of shared information, and a little bit of care and creativity in syntactic construction selection, crisis can usually be averted in many if not most natural language situations where individuals are introduced and tracked across event descriptions.   In synchronous and face to face auditory communication, we have the additional helpful knowledge of often knowing our conversants,  and having a shared set of information we can rely on due to context and mutual knowledge. We also have the extra tools of intonation and gesture to clarify instinctively what we intend. For example, consider the discourse in (4), which uses the potentially ambiguous pronouns `he’ and `him’, which we somehow have to share between the named protagonists to figure out who did what to whom.

• (4) “Thilo pushed Magnus, and then he kicked him.’’

If we utter the sentence neutral with a slight leaning on the word `kicked’ (4’),  then Thilo is the consistent aggressor here; if we stress both the pronouns and destress `kicked’ (4’’), then we understand that Magnus is the kicker and retaliator,  and Thilo is the one being kicked in this case.

(4’) “Thilo pushed Magnus, and then he kicked him.’’  (Thilo = kicker)

(4’’) “Thilo pushed Magnus, and then he kicked him.”  (Magnus = kicker)

Human users of language are constantly (and instinctively) juggling these different pressures on communication and fine tuning their output for clarity and efficiency according to the specific toolbox accorded by the words and grammar of the language they are communicating in, combined with the  knowledge they have of their interlocutors’  background interests and commitments.  It is easy to forget that the lowly pronoun, when it is not out there fighting on the frontlines of the culture wars, is the unassuming, almost contentless linkage device that makes discourses coherent, and that relies on the language user’s  complex inferential abilities and  knowledge to deploy and comprehend. Tracking pronoun use in human language is one of the most fascinating windows onto human communication and creativity you can find. 

When it comes to the written (published) word, the situation becomes more complex for the communicator because one can no longer exploit the shared communicative space of a single spatial and temporal context and a single well understood interlocutor. The published word is asynchronous communication because the producer of the message and the recipient of it do not operate simultaneously,  but often across great distances of time (and indeed space). In addition, the audience for these published written words is not a single recipient whose background knowledge and beliefs are in principle knowable, but a huge unpredictable audience of readers, united only by the fact that they wish to read the same text.  The writer in addition, by virtue of earning their living from said activity, has the pressure of having to create a text that is both comprehensible and pleasant (preferably even engaging and exciting) to convey their message. 

All this is perfectly obvious to both writers and linguists but I spell it out in gorey detail now because I have been bemused and befuddled by my recent experiences in newspaper reading, where I find the writers in sports journalism (yes, that’s the only part of the newspaper I actually read) have been developing creative and enterprising techniques for avoiding pronouns and names altogether leading to tracts of surreal creativity and for the uninitiated almost complete opacity, such as:³

• (5) `The game between Ipswich town and Newcastle United got off to a slow start with no score until the hosts put away a well deserved penalty in stoppage time at the end of the first half. The tractor boys are now facing relegation,  as the League cup winners scored twice in the second half to run away with the win.  ‘’

Ok, see what I  did there? Instead of repeating Ipswich and Newcastle United a couple of times each in the course of two sentences, and avoiding the pronoun they  that could be confusingly ambiguous, the author (me) has sprinkled the text with epithets. These are definite descriptive noun phrases that clearly denote a particular individual/group,  either because it’s a conventionalized nickname or a property uniquely held by one of the participants in the story. It is a clever way of referring to that participant one more time, unambiguously, without using the standard name label. Devices like the former  and the latter are a subtype of this technique, where the property that singles out the referent we intend is simply the property of being the first mentioned, or the second mentioned of the participants in the mix. But football writers never resort to anything so formal, stilted or obvious as `the former’ or the `the latter’. No, that would be cheating. Why make that pedestrian choice,  when instead you could use an epithet constructed from a property uniquely distinguishing your participants (in this case Ipswich Town vs. Newcastle United) using obscure in-group knowledge that only an actual football fan will parse transparently?  For full disclosure, I will admit that I have returned to live in England after twenty years of living abroad in Norway where I absolutely didn’t watch any English football at all (Wait, Ipswich Town is in the Premier League?!) and I had no idea that Ipswich Town were known by the affectionate nickname The Tractor Boys (huh?). And I also concede that I should know in advance of a match which team is the home team and which is the away team. But geez!  I am catching up after the weekend on a lot of games and I don’t remember off the top of my head whether Ipswich were playing home to  Newcastle, or vice versa. Who are the damn hosts? I don’t know,  Mr Sports Journalist. You lost me at `tractor boys’ and then the `host’  thing did nothing to clear it up.  Finally, if one were paying attention, as all football afficionados surely were (because the League cup is a Big Deal)  one should surely  know that Newcastle United won it, and are therefore the holders by the time this particular game gets played. So that one is easy, right? Not always. Here are a couple of  actual quotes from an online blog reporting on the Women’s Euros final played this summer (Guardian Minute by Minute report, Women’s Euros Final, 27th July, 2025 )

• (6) Every time England come forward there seems to be a million Spanish players in defence, that is how good they are at taking up space and pressing the defending champions.   …….
• (7) Spain are looking to hit England right back and Bronze gets a yellow card for a challenge on Carmona. The world champions have a free kick now.

Texts (6) and (7) occur in quick succession during the course of the Guardian online blog of the match. In (6), the defending champions  refers to England because they won the Euros the last time it was held back in 2022. In (7), the world champions  refers to Spain because they won the Women’s World Cup in 2023.   Unless you are really really paying attention, or a total womens football nerd, and not skimming at all, this could slow you down because the two epithets look so superficially similar. In (6) the italicized phrase removes the need for them or a repetition of England. In (7), Spain  would be reasonable choice here, and totally natural sounding so the use of the epithet seems somewhat gratuitous. But epithets aren’t just an avoidance strategy, they also have positive value in conveying information in their own right. Let us go back to Thilo and Magnus for a second. Suppose I say:

• (8) “Thilo talked to  Magnus on the phone yesterday and the bastard didn’t even wish him happy birthday.’’

So the question is, who had the birthday and who is the bastard? Suppose I am talking to you and we both know it was Magnus’  birthday, (and I know you know etc.), then I also know that you will infer that I mean Thilo with the epithet the bastard , even if you don’t possess the information or belief that he is  a bastard, or even that I think so.  But you do  know that I think so after my utterance, because you accommodate that information to make the discourse coherent. So an epithet like this, even if its first and main job is to signal reference to a particular entity in our mental world, also has a secondary function of smuggling in some extra information `on the side’<sup>4</sup>. In the case of (8), the extra information my hearer gets is my critical stance towards Thilo. In (6), the extra information the reader gets (or reminder she gets) is that England are the defending Euro champs and so we should feel some extra drama in their fight to win back-to-back finals. In (7) the information is smuggled in that Spain are the world champions, adding to the drama again because we are reminded these ladies are the best in the world and will be so hard to beat! So provided reference is successful, the use of the epithet contributes to the semantic richness of the concepts at play in unfolding the story for an audience.  I suspect this is another part of the reason that epithets are so staggeringly prevalent in football journalism. Imagine the sheer tedium of having to write a blow by blow account taking place over the course of a whole 90 minutes,  where you have to find more and more creative ways of referring to Ipswich Town and Newcastle while negotiating the constant threat of ambiguity in the pronoun `they’.  And avoiding the dull thudding unimaginative proper name repetition that would be the only obvious alternative⁵. The nerdy epithet: A somewhat marginal device in face to face discourse; unlikely saviour of exciting sporting journalism in the written genre. Extra bonus the nerdier and more creative the journalist can be, and extra extra bonus for constructing texts that are obscure and off-putting to all  but the true tribe who understand all the code required to tell who did what to whom. I’m clearly going to need to up my football game. At least before the new season starts….

1. In case anyone is worried, I can assure the tenderhearted reader that my son did eventually acquire English perfectly with a full repertoire of pronouns at his disposal (Good save, Mamma!) ↩︎
2. Linguists debate whether (2) is genuinely ungrammatical in English or just so truly aesthetically awful that no native speaker would ever voluntarily produce it. ↩︎
3. The following is pure invention, a fake text inspired by my reading experiences. ↩︎
4. Linguists call this `not at-issue content’. ↩︎
5. Again, I think face to face, people talking to each other find ways of using intonation and de-stressing to mitigate the effects of both repetition and ambiguity, but the sports writer cannot call on these devices. Writing good copy is hard! ↩︎