Is a Horse a Who?
by Roger Lyons
The use of the personal relative pronoun as a reference to horses–who and whom instead of which and that–struck me as peculiar when I first took an interest in racing. I thought it stood out like a sore thumb, but deferred to what I took as a stylized convention of turf writing.
Adopted self-consciously at first, the conventions of turf writing settled comfortably into my speech and writing–all except that one. Gradually, it began to stick in my craw. That’s just the opposite of the way a convention is supposed to work. When introduced to an unfamiliar culture, one finds its conventions strange at first, but then becomes inured to them. As they take their place in the framework of one’s understanding of others, they recede into the background of one’s awareness. To me, however, “who” and “whom” for horses became more obtrusive over time, not less.
The long and the short of it is that the personal pronominalization of horses doesn’t feel like a convention. It feels more like a pretense. This becomes all the more evident in view of the grammar of motives.
Besides the person/non-person grammatical contingency, pronouns also have the contingency of number–singular or plural. Most people refer to themselves with the singular pronouns “I” and “me,” but not everyone. Monarchs have the prerogative of the plural “we” and “us”–the “royal we” as it is called. Just as this usage poses an exception to the grammatical aspect of number, the use of who and whom for horses compromises the aspect of person, and it strikes me that these two aberrations share in the same motive. By way of pronoun reference, certain horses are valorized over other animals just as the monarch is invidiously distinguished from other persons.
Now, imagine how pretentious it would seem to a naive reader of bloodstock writing that employs both forms of this artifice. It’s not unheard of.
And have you noticed, as I have, that in American speech and writing the word “that” is displacing ordinary use of the word “who”? Even speech and writing about thoroughbreds, which insists upon “who” for horses, is abandoning it as a relative pronoun of reference to persons!
This grammatical depersonalization of actual persons seems significant in an age of declining civility and, at least for me, renders the personalization of horses that much more difficult to process.
I think that the use of “who” to refer to horses is a relatively recent development. In older books and newspaper accounts, horses are generally referred to as “which,” which to my contemporary ears sounds jarring.
April 26th, 2011 at 2:38 pmI suspect you’re right, Teresa, and that it’s owed to a single influential journalist or publication.
April 26th, 2011 at 4:35 pmKent Hollingsworth’s columns from the Blood-Horse (which I read in the collection The Archjockey of Canterbury) always used “which,” and the old, old racing reports in the New York Times (19th century until about the mid-20th, I think) do the same thing. Would be interesting to see when it changed.
April 26th, 2011 at 4:48 pmThanks, Teresa, for checking on Kent Hollingsworth, who remains my favorite turf writer of all time. He’s also useful for chronologically locating the who-whom phenomenon, which he seems to have resisted, because his writing extends across the 1990s–wrote for the Thoroughbred Times after retiring as Editor of The Blood-Horse. But that usage was common as early as the early 1970s. Still back-tracking.
UPDATE: Our conjecture that this is a late-developing phenomenon appears wrong. C.M. Prior habitually follows this usage writing in the 1920s.
April 26th, 2011 at 7:36 pmThank you, Roger, for pointing out one of my pet peeves. It caused me to look into The New Yorker archives to check if my first influential turf writer, George F. T. Ryall, ever used personal relative pronouns when referring to horses. From what I could tell the English-educated Ryall, who for more than 50 years penned “The Race Track” column under the nom de plume of Audax Minor, seems never to have committed the sin.
I’ve always sensed that writers who use “who” and “whom” tend to tilt toward the sentimental and anthropomorphic, not unlike those people who insistently refer to foals as “babies”.
The aforementioned Ryall once referred to himself as a peevish fellow who believed that horses deserve good names and that the better racers are well named. I can’t help wondering what Ryall would have made of this year’s early Derby favorite burdened with a name that sounds rather like a relative of one of the Three Stooges.
April 30th, 2011 at 11:19 amI didn’t expect anyone to agree with me about this, Allison, so you can imagine how gratified I am to have the support of Kent Hollingsworth, Audax Minor, and YOU. Many thanks.
May 2nd, 2011 at 12:36 pm