The Curious Case of the Sock

As most of you know, I have spent most of my time for the the last seven months studying Hebrew, the most difficult language I have had the pleasure of breaking my head over. Fortunately, I have been blessed with lively and engaging teachers and interesting classmates, so the process has been fun, despite my ever-present feeling of bafflement.

There are a whole host of reasons that Hebrew is so challenging, especially for English speakers. Take a different alphabet that reads from right to left, leave out useful things like vowels and capital letters, change up the sound and/or form of certain letters depending on their position in a word — and well — at least it’s not Chinese.

But the particular linguistic challenge that I want to focus on in this post is the gender issue.

I have studied other gendered languages, but never one as relentlessly so as this one. There is simply no concept of “it”. All nouns and pronouns are masculine or feminine — and adjectives must match. Verb conjugations are also gendered so that for example the word “go” in, I “go”, you “go”, or they “go” would be different for men and women. The car “goes” (fem) is a different verb form than the plane “goes” (masc) or the bicycle “goes” which, as it happens, is not just masculine but plural! (Don’t ask.) Consequently, there is an awful lot of thinking that has to go into every sentence. It is very tiring.

And of course, in any given group of people or things that have even one masculine member, the masculine pronoun and related verb or adjective will prevail. Proponents of gender equality have yet to find a way around this, and those who prefer neutral pronouns such as “they” in English are equally stymied.

Apart from obvious words like man and woman, there is often no particular logic to the assignment of gender, and so many exceptions to how they migrate into the plural, that it is foolish to think you can rely on any rules of thumb. Nonetheless we cannot help try.

Which brings me to the sock.

There is a general rule that many things that come in pairs — especially those related to the body — which in the plural end in “ayim”, are often feminine. For example: eyes, ears, lips, arms, legs, feet and so forth. Also shoes. But not socks. They are masculine, as in the image above.

Or at least they were… when we first studied pages and pages of exceptions three weeks ago. But then, that very week, the Academy of the Hebrew Language, the authority on all things Hebrew — which usually focuses on coming up with new words for novel things like “computers” — decided in its wisdom that henceforth “socks” may be either masculine or feminine, whichever you like!! (As is so charmingly illustrated below.)

Why “socks” should be subject to such special treatment, and not “boots” or “ankles”, is anyone’s guess.

“Breasts”, on the other hand, remain resolutely masculine, linguistically speaking.