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Miss Poubelle is not usually a big fan of the "prisonhouse of language" theory. Proponents of this view claim that the sorts of things we might think or do are severely limited by the kinds of words and structures found in our languages. If we don't have the word for something, it is hard or impossible to think about it or to act on it. Thus language acts like an invisible prison that keeps us confined to a certain mental or behavioral area.

It seems to Blanche that if we find we don't have the word that we need to express a certain idea, we are free to invent a new word or borrow it from another language. So English doesn't have a good native word for Schadenfreude, that deliciously wicked German emotion of experiencing pleasure as the result of another's misfortune. But we've borrowed the German word, and that seems to do as well as any native word would.

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Miss Poubelle's sanguine attitude toward language prisons, however, is most adequate when dealing with areas where our language has a certain gap. It is easy enough to fill in the gap. But there is a challenge in the other direction, and that comes when a language forces us to be explicit about a distinction we would prefer to avoid. Let's call these "forced choices."

The famous English example of a forced choice has to do with gender and indefinite pronouns in instances like Nearly everyone thinks that he is his mother's favorite. According the prescriptive rule, everyonerequires a singular pronoun in what follows. But English singular pronouns force the speaker to choose the gender: he, she, or it. We must risk being thought sexist (by using he), strange (by using she), wordy (by using he or she), or uneducated (by switching to plural they). Blanche is in the they camp, but each of the other solutions has its advocates.

Fortunately, English has relatively few of these forced choices. Some other languages are full of them. In Hebrew, for example, every single noun in the language must be masculine or feminine-- there is no neuter. The pronouns offer no relief. So there are different pronouns for "you (masculine)" and "you (feminine)," as well as different pronouns for "they (masculine)" and "they (feminine)."

What does that mean for a GLBT speaker of Hebrew? The writer Liora Moriel has pointed out that Hebrew often forces you to reveal the gender of everyone you mention. So in English, you can rather ambiguously say that you spent the weekend with a friend-- gender unspecified. But in Hebrew, you have to specify a male friend (xaver) or a female friend (xaverah). If you mention your lover, you have to let the hearer know if the lover is male or female.

In English, we often talk about being in or out of the closet. But that oversimplifies a complex situation. Even those of us who are out to all our friends and family may not choose to reveal our sexual orientation to the plumber or the newspaper carrier. We can use the vague partner, significant other, friend, or roommate to talk about the person who shares our bed without revealing their gender. Israelis usually don't have this choice.

The issue is even more acute for transgendered Hebrew speakers because verb inflection reflects the gender of the subject of the sentence (at least in the present tense). To say "I love you" a man says Ani ohev, but a woman says Ani ohevet. This grammatical requirement means that when a Hebrew speaker uses the pronoun "I," she or he is frequently forced to declare a gender at the same time. So what is a good Israeli tranny to do? Such a dilemma!

It's in these hard cases that Miss Poubelle starts to see some truth in the prisonhouse view. When Hebrew forces you over and over to declare the gender of everyone mentioned in a conversation, it is harder to think of gender as a continuum or a set of cultural conventions.

Maybe some languages do have structures that present us with forced choices that we'd prefer to avoid. And just as in the English he/she/they dilemma, the language sometimes gives us no easy way out.

In science-fiction futures, the people often end up speaking artificial languages that reflect various utopian gender or class distinctions. Unfortunately, we're stuck with the languages we have and must struggle with their limitations. But the situation is not entirely hopeless. Perhaps a language that allows us enough mental flexibility to notice the problem will also help us find a way around it.