Even in my French class at school, I never much liked the idea of “girl” and “boy” nouns. Not least because I was a girl and the boys were always cited first.

Colour-coding vocab lists in pink and blue was even worse. At an existential level, I was instinctively rebellious.

But I was also a sucker for words. I was seduced - and distracted from issues of equality - by the serious-sounding categories of “masculine” and “feminine”: the markers of intellectual rigour. Later, as head of languages at an independent school in Cambridge, it became a point of principle with me to use these categories with the primary-age children I was teaching. My whole approach was founded on confidence in their ability to rise to my belief in them: if you start by shying away from abstract concepts, you send out completely the wrong message.

So, in my idealist role as teacher, I willingly embraced both masculine and feminine and gave them equal billing on the page. Well, almost equal. The masculine still had pride of place on the left. The masculine was what you attended to first. On the face of it innocent, but in essence socially and culturally freighted. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex: “Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female.” An add-on or ornament, a quasi-adjectival adjunct.

There was good pedagogical reason to follow the convention. It seemed as fundamental as putting the units to the right of the 10s in maths. Tidy habits make for a tidy mind. But the truth was it didn’t really matter - except in one, very human way. Swap the order, and linguistically nothing changes. But, sociologically, it’s a revolution.

Increasingly, it strikes me that, as a teacher, I must revise the way I do things. Slough off that cloak of compliance and adopt a new, more anti-establishment look. Put the feminine first, but not dressed up in pretty pink.

It could be that gendered languages - among them heavy hitters Spanish, French, German and Russian - are among the last strongholds of gender binarism. And perhaps scrupulous teachers are unwittingly colluding in perpetuating this reductive, restrictive, anti-egalitarian paradigm. There are few contexts in contemporary Western culture where it is still legitimate to speak without self-consciousness of “masculine” and “feminine”. What useful meaning does this opposition retain?

Maybe it’s an accidental by-product of our compulsion to classify. But even if you argue, along with Saussure, that linguistic signs are arbitrary, that there is no necessary connection between the signifier “table” and the object it signifies - that a table might as well be labelled “chair” - there is no escaping the semantic resonance that accrues to words over centuries of use and abuse. And no denying that gendered languages endorse a persistently gendered mindset. Grammar can be arbitrary, too.

Masculine lips, feminine mouths

Fortunately, even at an elementary level, there are ways you can disrupt this absurd grammatical binarism to subversive, thought-provoking ends. “Look,” I tell the children in my class, “the Spanish noun for ‘people’ is feminine. So too ‘reason’ and ‘intelligence’ and ‘compassion’.

“But yes, ‘love’ is masculine - imagine that. And look: your hair and eyes and lips are all masculine, but your nose and mouth and ears are feminine.”

Where does masculine you end and feminine you begin? There is no clear-cut division; we are all a merry muddle of X and Y.

Like Wittgenstein said, the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Research at Stanford University (Boroditsky, 2002) has found that the common noun “bridge” attracts different responses among German and Spanish speakers: die Brücke (feminine) is perceived as “pretty” and “fragile”; el puente (masculine) as “sturdy” and “strong”. Tired associations, as burdensome to men as to women. When a word has two genders, as in the German Leiter, the masculine referent (“leader”) is almost always more powerful than the feminine (“ladder”).

Further research (Prewitt-Freilino, 2011) shows that countries with gendered languages “evidence less gender equality compared to countries with other grammatical gender systems”. Among female migrants to the US (Gay, 2017), “those who speak a language which makes sex-based grammatical gender distinctions exhibit lower labour-force participation … with larger effects for languages with more pervasive gender elements”.

Our languages don’t merely reflect, but shape our world view. This is not for want of trying on the part of activists. Sweden introduced the gender-neutral pronoun hen in 1966 (formally recognised in 2014). West Germany banned official use of fräulein in the early 1970s. The title “Ms” was approved for use in US government documents around the same time.

The avant-gardistes of the University of Leipzig now insist on the feminine plural for mixed-gender groups: one giant leap for humankind in stemming the tide of patriarchy.

But the laudable trend towards feminisation throws up its own problems. In French, for example, it frequently carries overtones of sexualisation, as in maîtresse (for teachers), or danseuse (for dancers). A rouleur is a racing cyclist; a rouleuse is a woman of easy virtue.

In 2017, France published its first linguistically inclusive textbook. The objective was to promote use of the mid-dot - or median-period - at the end of masculine nouns, followed by the feminine ending and, if required, the plural too, as in: musicien.ne.s. Prescriptivists denounced the initiative as an act of vandalism, and claimed those responsible for it were idiot.e.s. But Éliane Viennot, professor of Renaissance French, retorted with a simple argument: “Telling children the masculine form wins over the feminine cannot contribute to shaping egalitarian minds.”

The political case for the mid-dot is incontrovertible. The practical problem is the way it clutters up the page. Marie Kondo would not approve. The well-intentioned punctuation mark, theoretically unobtrusive, makes the language harder to read, harder to spell and harder to pronounce. A giant leap forwards, but several steps backwards as well. It was never going to fly.

Spanish has made creative use of the economical @ symbol. Chic@s and latin@s send out a strong visual message but also trip off the tongue - “chícaos”, “latínaos” - with the added value of reversing the old world order by putting the feminine first. It’s a neat, but partial, solution, limited to words whose dictionary form ends in “o”.

The popular Latinx can be pluralised - Latinexes - according to the natural laws of the language. Specious objections that the designation is current only in the States, and by definition othering, ignore the reality that the country is multilingual, with English and Spanish nurturing and nourishing each other in ways no border wall can obstruct or contain.

Like water, languages will always seek out the easiest route. Like gender, they are intrinsically fluid. Which is why in English, a “natural-gender” language, use of singular “they” - as in “the singer-songwriter is performing their own song” - has won out over the more alien, disorienting neologisms “ze”, “hir” and “xem”.

In the schoolroom, languages aspire towards a black-and-white, right-versus-wrong binary accuracy. Increased accuracy will get you more marks, better grades, entry to a better university, a higher class of degree. But that’s not the real world. It’s OK to strive after perfection, but only if you accept that it’s not only unachievable, but undesirable.

Sick use of language

Perfection is not in the nature of language because it’s not in the nature of human beings. But imperfection has the virtues of its vices. Unlike maths, languages are inconsistent and self-contradictory, but

also tolerant, inclusive and endlessly accommodating. You want “sick” to mean “great” ? You prefer “me and my friends” to “my friends and I” ? Fine, we can adapt.

You want to drop the preposition “on” after the verb “to impact” ? OK, why not? Less is almost always more. And, anyway, hasn’t Latino Spanish dropped the al from jugar al fútbol (to play football), to go with the English flow?

So why not meet halfway? We do it all the time, out of empathy or a desire to fit in, moulding our forms of speech to the rhythms and patterns and eccentricities of those around us. Parents copy children. We all copy those inspirational athletes - exemplary for their multilingualism - who have demonstrated once and for all that “I played good” gets the meaning across just as effectively as “I played well”. Mistake the gender of baguette and even the most pernickety of French boulangers isn’t likely to refuse the sale. Understanding may be enhanced by accuracy, but only rarely depends on it.

This is perhaps the greatest single benefit of multilingualism: a general increase in mutual tolerance, both human and linguistic. It’s not exactly laissez-faire, but a live-and-let-live attitude towards our shared fallibility. Better to speak more languages imperfectly than to be mistress of a paltry one. In opening our minds to other cultures, we learn to expect - and delight in - the unexpected, which better prepares us to embrace difference in our own.

Unless we all opt for non-gendered Finnish, or Estonian, or Chinese, in my view language learning has to get messier. We need to be more open to experimentation and more interested in error. Play is the mother of invention. Nonsense can lead to new - and better - sense in the long run. Creative error is not the exclusive preserve of poets. It’s only a matter of time before some of those mistakes catch on, and what was once deemed “wrong” is accepted as “right”. Grammatical accuracy was never a guarantee of understanding between human beings. We know that from experience.

I can no longer use the terms “masculine” and “feminine” innocently or unquestioningly. If I did, I would be liable - I hope - to be challenged by my pupils. And, should they offer the feminine plural for a mixed group of nouns, instead of the masculine as convention demands, I would no longer dismiss it as wrong.

Once upon a time, I will tell them, that would have been considered incorrect. But no longer. Now it is one among a legitimate spectrum of possibilities. Grammar is fluid. It’s your language as much as mine. It’s down to you to expand the possibilities further, to extend the limits of your world.

They may be my students. But they are my teachers, too.

Heather Martin is an independent scholar and linguist

This article originally appeared in the 1 November 2019 issue under the headline “Try not to get hung up on linguistic convention, chic@s”