" Pronouns are proxies for nouns. They stand in willingly when nouns don’t want to hang around sounding repetitive. The noun (or noun phrase), whose bidding the pronoun does, is called the antecedent—because it goes (ced-) before (ante-) the pronoun in the sentence or paragraph. "

― Constance Hale , Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose