The Pronoun Wars

It’s always been allowed, and always will be,
To introduce new words, fresh from the mint,
Just as in forests in the changing year
New leaves come in and the oldest drop away,
And the new ones bloom and prosper in their time.

—Horace, "The Art of Poetry"

Change, relentless change, is the keynote of language. A young person who sees notice on Turner Classic Movies of the movie The Gay Divorcee (1934) is likely to think it about a marriage riven by homosexuality, or the divorce of one homosexual from another, for the word gay no longer means, as it did in 1934, light-hearted and carefree. Or consider the word disinterested, which once meant impartial, not influenced by personal advantage, but has now come to mean without interest in if not positively bored by something. The English language, that magnificent edifice, can sometimes seem without foundation.

Most words are subject to change but least likely among them, or so until a few decades ago one would have thought, have been pronouns, those mostly two-, three-, and four-letter words that stand in for nouns: he, she, it, we, you, they, along with the possessives my, mine, yours, ours, and theirs. But we now live in a time when one may choose one’s own pronoun, which many people, especially among the young, happily do. I have not myself been asked to choose my pronoun, though the other day on a medical form I was asked about my hobby, to which I answered "collecting grievances." When asked about my favorite pronoun, my answer will be "schmuckowitz."

This new interest in pronouns has provided a field day for linguists. The job of the linguist, as John McWhorter, perhaps the best-known linguist of our day, has described it in his book Nine Nasty Words, is to find "structure in what seems like chaos, mess, or the trivial … we take in what looks like a mess and try to make out the sense in it. We like to think of ourselves as scientists. … The idea is to find the sense in the chaos."

A better guide through this maze than John McWhorter is not readily imagined. He brings to the task a strong element of good sense, nicely combined with references to contemporary movies, television, and popular culture at large. He adds touches of levity throughout. One notable example is his giving one of his chapters in Pronoun Trouble the title "She, He, It." In a footnote he cites the book Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars, adding "Not one to bring to the beach, for the record."

McWhorter’s learning is wide. In a sample passage from Pronoun Trouble he writes: "Legions of languages worldwide have a single pronoun covering both he- and she-ness, such as Finnish, Indonesian, Mandarin, and so many others," at the end of which an asterisk footnote sets out a Chinese example. In Nine Nasty Words one finds this not atypical sentence: "In Saramaccan, spoken in the Surinamese rain forest and created only a few centuries ago by descendants of slaves who combined English, Portuguese, Dutch, and two African languages, Fongbe and Kikongo, one of the ways of conveying the same elevation is ‘to the point that I was happy.’"

Pronoun Trouble recounts the history of our contemporary English pronouns, while adding reflections on language generally. McWhorter writes, again in Nine Nasty Words, "language change becomes a spectator sport of sorts for linguists rather than the tale of woe and degradation we are so often taught." He adds: "All languages leak." Language, in other words, like life itself, is subject to endless alteration.

Consider the history of "thou" and "thee," which preceded the pronoun "you." From John McWhorter we learn the various permutations of this complex second-person singular pronoun. McWhorter writes: "People of higher social status used thou downward, to people of lower status, including children and also, alas, men addressing women." In Shakespeare’s day "thou" was used to address people below one on the social scale, "you" used, so to say, upwardly. Thus Othello addresses Iago as "thou," Iago Othello as "you." Yet in the Bible, God is addressed as "thou." Thou eventually disappeared from common speech, though not among Quakers, who continue to use "thou" and "thee." One of the fascinating if not also troubling things about language change is its inconsistency. "Amid all the rules and patterns that drive language change," McWhorter writes, "serendipity always plays its hand."

McWhorter devotes a section to the "I-me" question. When one knocks on a door or rings a bell and is asked who it is, one answers "It’s me," or at least it feels natural to answer "It’s me." In fact it is grammatically correct to answer "It is I." The distinction, I would say, is between normal and formal English. I happen to be an "It is I" man, which puts me in the category McWhorter calls "stockinged grammar-pusses grappling to square a circle." I also say "He is older than I," and "She is cleverer than I," instead of "than me." Many years ago Winston cigarettes ran a commercial with the tag line, "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." Grammar-pusses of the day objected to the ungrammatical use of "like," to which Winston, in a second commercial, responded, "What do you want, good grammar or good taste?"

Pronoun Trouble might not exist if in recent years the country hadn’t undergone, precisely, trouble with pronouns, especially with the third person plural "they." McWhorter refers to "the new hegemony of they." He goes along with the use of the singular "they" to replace "he" or "she," noting that the resistance to it "has eased considerably in the twenty-first century," adding "it’s high time, because it never made any actual sense." The new use of "they" replacing the old singular "he" or "he and she" is ubiquitous. Newt Gingrich on Fox News recently remarked that "a judge shouldn’t be allowed to impose their views." In the caption of a recent New Yorker cartoon, a mother says to her son, "Just remember, Mr. Big Fancy Libertarian, no one is a self-made man to their mother." (Italics mine.) In an earlier day both those "theirs" would have been "his" or "her" or "his and her."

The "he" in the sentence "Everybody knows that he has to be careful with money," is no longer acceptable. It used to be understood that it covered both men and women, but today, in the age of raging feminism, it no longer passes as valid, might likely be considered misogynist. McWhorter writes of "the overt masculinity" of he, noting that "the day is past when Anglophones were taught by grammarians that he refers to both men and women." He allows that "we need a gender neutral pronoun in English," but goes along with substituting "they" for "he" or "she" where a choice is possible. Here he adduces many great authors of the past who were comfortable using "they" in place of "he," among them Shakespeare, Henry Fielding, Richard Sheridan, Joseph Addison, and the Bible.

Still, the substitution brings problems in its train, especially when "they" is used in place of the singular "he" or "she." McWhorter makes a reference to an article by Parul Sehgal on Judith Butler, in last year’s New Yorker (April 29, 2024) in which the difficulties implicit in the new use of "they" become evident. I, too, was puzzled by the article when first I read it. Judith Butler, the feminist and gender studies specialist, prefers the pronoun "they/them" but doesn’t "police it." Ms. Sehgal nevertheless uses "they" to refer to her throughout her article, much to the confusion on any reader’s part, when confronted by such sentences as "Their [Butler’s] academic work on gender from the nineteen-nineties, albeit in distorted form, has incited fury" and "Butler marveled. Their hands made a quick movement, flowers bursting into bloom."

McWhorter cites who uses the new "they" and who doesn’t: "A survey of several hundred people in 2019 showed that the new they was accepted, and often used, by most subjects under thirty-five, was more often dismissed by subjects over fifty-five, and elicited mixed feelings among people between thirty-five and fifty-five. Nonbinary and trans people were especially likely to approve of and use the new they." On television recently I heard McWhorter suggest that capitalizing the T in the new use of "they" might be helpful. I, for one, do not find it so.

As for me, I shall continue to use "he" and, where appropriate, "he and she," and forgo the false etiquette that is really only political correctness and use "they." For me, to advert to the old Winston commercial, good grammar is good taste. If you wish to be in touch to argue the point further, do, please, try to remember that my own preferred pronoun is schmuckowitz.

Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words
by John McWhorter
Avery, 240 pp., $28

Joseph Epstein is the author, most recently, of The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books).

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