A Preamble from Lived Experience
As a Latin teacher, I had to convince students that "you" and "you" are not the same word. It is a peculiarity of English (noted also by students of French and Spanish as well), that the English pronoun "you" can be singular or plural. You are the only one for me, Carmelita. You alone, soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, can secure the base of Mount Pilot. Latin, like some other languages, tags the difference between singular and plural "you" by using entirely different words; in fact, the distinction, (which English does not possess), ripples from Latin pronouns to adjectives, demonstratives, verbs and participles. It is a constitutive element of the language. Fortunately for a native Southerner, our speech has for you a not so distant plural form: ya'll.
I realize that I just misspelled y'all; however, that is germane. When I began with 7th graders, I introduced the use of y'all (the Southern English 2nd person personal pronoun) early in the curriculum. It is an understandable English counterpart to Latin; thus it is useful for an English speaker's acquisition of Latin. I received strong resistance from students and parents: y'all is NOT a real word.
Not a real word; nonetheless, it was heard daily at the school. It was a growing metropolitan area, so there were Northerners and Floridians (they seemed a lot alike) and folks from the West Coast and Ohio. Mostly it was Southern families paying for an education preferred to the public schools. They all knew-- more on that later-- that y'all was not a real word.
If it was not a real word, then it could not be spelled incorrectly; consequently, I ever after employed the novel spelling *ya'll*. It was partly Puck, but it was also method: the 2nd person plural may be debatable as well formed English, but it will be used in learning Latin. Being trained to understand a new language requires more than memorization. New strategies are required, and submission to them is necessary. Some of my former students who have now forgotten Latin, have to pause if ever they write "y'all"-- is that spelled correctly? A tiny part of their training stuck. So, yes, pronouns are not necessarily so straight forward and without possible mischief. Similarly, some Latin teachers.
Pronouns and Grammatical Prescription
Presently, people are attempting to change English pronouns. In point of fact, English pronouns have changed previously. Off in the distant and as-we-now-know-silly past, thee and thou were English pronouns. They are no longer well formed English; however, use of them would produce amusement, not incoherence. While 21st centuries readers might refer to these two words in declaring the 1611 King James English Bible undecipherable, it is not the pronouns but archaic vocabulary and verb forms that make that text seem to pitch and roll. Pronouns are so simple, that incoherence does not arise even when some clever adolescent substitutes *cat-self* for personal pronouns. One might criticize the idiosyncrasy, but not as a failure to communicate. An English teacher can't well red-ink the margin, "narcissistic blowhard novelty," but rather, "use standard pronouns in academic papers."
The use of who and whom provides an example. Who is a relative pronoun standing in for a noun that serves as the subject of a verb: "I know a man who hates the chef." Whom stands for a noun as the direct object or object of a preposition. "The man, whom I hate, cooks abysmally." Many an English teacher, or grammar pendant at a dinner party, has piped up, "whom, not who; whom I had met previously, not who I had met." The rejoinder is not: "Wait, I don't understand what you just said." The distinction between who and whom is not necessary for satisfactory communication-- unless you wish to avoid such interruptions of rectitude. Will who/whom fade into archaic status, fossilized in phrases like "To whom it may concern"? If the distinction persists, it will not be out of a narrow desire for coherence and clarity. Thou/thee was a pair distinguishing the subject and direct object, which gave way to the all purpose "you". Unless people are trained to use who/whom-- not just occasionally nagged-- whom will disappear.
The nuance is not necessary for successful communication. People just think poorly of your speech. Perhaps they think poorly of you. Perhaps they think better of you-- removing resonances with English teachers and dinner party pendants. Here is the titanic struggle at hand, the joust and headlock maneuvers, the subliminal micro-upmanshiping: minimal points of grammar are hoisted as the tools of social contention.
Ya'll has other regional counterparts. In Appalachia, you'uns. Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh with swagger, has yinz. (I know not if those are the correct spellings.) These are not standard English. Anyone with good sense only uses them within those environs or in familiar conversation, lest you be taken for a good ol' boy, or hillbilly or yinzer. Standard English is a kind of egalitarian elitism. Everyone conforms to what is proper, well-formed and normal. Y'all is no longer a real word for the real world.
That norm surely was established by the revolution of radio and television media in the 20th century as much as by standardized education. The training was not only by instruction but also by modeling. The indigenous regional forms of English have not waned because they lacked coherence or elegance. People just don't want to sound stupid when they aren't talking to "folks from around here." We could ponder the Oxford comma, about which I did not hear until I was 40-- and still haven't stopped hearing about. At times an honest pedant must choose between silent admiration or a cough-covered-snicker at our delicate dancing-- as when someone successfully and adroitly avoids ending a sentence with a preposition. Such spoken finesse evidences training and careful practice, although some grammatical prescriptions are like colored contact lenses. They only make you more attractive, or garish.
Language Changes-- Despite Resistance
Language changes. There is no Czar in charge, or telepathic synergism dictating such changes. There are typically people who prescribe grammatical correctness, but such insistence pursues more than successful communication. Other criteria are invoked. At the start of college, my father (an award winning journalist) gave me his well worn copy of Strunk & White. This training greatly improved my writing, but taught me little about English.
The thin volume is eponymous due to its influence, but the sum is its actual title: The Elements of Style. It assumed my fluency and prescribed norms for that fluency. It inculcates patterns of simplicity and strategies for clarity. It can be resisted, though submission is enriching. Writing in the passive voice is all but anathematized: if passive voice verbs are not shunned, the communication is weakened. A comparison can be made with Koine Greek. This ancient lingua franca employed a standard expression which is called "the divine passive." It does not name God as the agent; instead, it employs the passive voice to emphasize God's providential power by leaving him unmentioned. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did not have Strunk & White, yet they had this potent laconic tool.
Again, language changes, yet people will communicate. People who attempt to stabilize language, or work to change it, invoke other criteria. The nearly 400 year work of the Académie Française is the grandest demonstration that language changes unless you do something about it. In the 21st Century, the Academy defends the French voice against the "deadly snobbery of Anglo-American." L'email no more ought to taint the French palette than catsup. Unfortunately for the Academy, their influence on the training of even the native French is drastically less than the internet. They do have the solace of being correct, and important.
Interestingly, the Academy was abolished for a decade during the French Revolution; but since Napoleon's regime, it has claimed to rule French. The endeavor is so august that the voting members hold the office of "Immortals." The Academy's compelled hiatus during the Revolution may indicate how seriously these immortals consider their task. Language changes. You can occasionally see that fact pass fleetingly in the flinch of well educated people. Yet, it is a large world. Francophones continue to communicate in so carefree a manner that snobbery seems a singularly squint-eyed synonym for joie de vivre.
Pronouns, Civilization and Contention
Strunk & White would see the passive voice withered. The Académie Française searches for a coup de grace to fend off the invasive utility of English loan words. More ominously, Orwell's 1984 imagined a comprehensive revision of language (morphology, dictionary, syntax) as an apparatus of totalitarianism. Orwell understood that language establishes a default understanding of the world; thus it offers a useful tool for social manipulation. The increasing advocacy for late 20th century gender theory demands social training in the use of pronouns-- an initial meta-lexical aspiration towards Newspeak.
Language change is not new, nor is the policing of language. Our present moment, however, is always new. America has ridden an arc of late, or bounced down a rough-hewn staircase. Still, the next is new. Weighty references are made to the right side of history, but apart from the day of judgement-- tomorrow is the only other side of history in reach. What is happening? What is next? There is no Academy, nor language Czar, nor reeducation camps.
Today localities are points on the map, to which food from far away and gadgets from farther away and corporate decisions from who-knows-where sustain nearly all but local color and temperament. Localism is minor politics and niche endeavors. We depend profoundly upon persons and entities which have no clear obligation to us, nor we to them-- except so far as the legal code establishes and litigation enforces. These produce urban food-deserts, the disappearance of affordable housing, and the unwieldy backward-engineering sought in legislation from more than 50 miles away. Decisions, then options, and this is how we do.
We are reduced to appeals about undefinable fairness and unidentifiable communities. People are reduced to an intersection of citizen, consumer and individual psychology. Laws and stuff and feelings are our only resources. What is right in front of our eyes divulges no foundational truth and no foundational opportunity. Unsurprisingly, your best source on pronouns is CNN or NPR. Such "fair and balanced reporting of daily events" is the explanatory lesson for the training in our up-to-date English, that Egalitarian elitism that elevates us from being locals. Many are laboring to train our speech.
Family has collapsed, smaller than the shrunken nucleus it was not long ago, into mere proximity of place and personal history. The sciences and the law can find only DNA in son, daughter, sibling, mother or father. Anything other than the double helix is environment. The novelty and permanency of each family (begun by decisions, ended with deaths, extending by generations) is reduced to the psychological particularity of individuals entangled by the requirements entailed in the status of dependent minors. Of all the moral maxims passed down, surely the most apparently absurd is:
“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long
in the land that the LORD your God is giving you." (Exodus 20:12)
It seems one-sided, mere hierarchy. It ignores the alienation of generations considered normal today. What is this honor-- a verb, doing what? Even if one avoids the farcically colloquial birthing persons, why not parents-- as if father and mother differ in more than biology? With familial aspirations of honor (a verb!) evaporated from homes and holidays, of course long life in some sort of promised land hinges on capitalism and consumerism. So, unsurprisingly, as pronouns are chosen (preferred is now recognized as a micro-aggression), there is advocacy for chosen families.
Father and mother dissolve even more finely than he and she; the new prescription for pronouns is no more neutral than it is necessary for communication. Like localities, families are mere small sets-- but established by biological cause and effect. They are individuals sharing space and history and resources-- each person well described by individual desires and potentials. Actually the biological cause and effect also is being drained from the word family. Parentage-- that honor thing, two-sided but not symmetrical-- becomes superfluous when individuals are fundamentally desire-plus-potential bounded by consent and defined by choices.
The Elements of Style can be revised and updated. Father and mother can be redefined as the legal adults with particular chosen obligations to consenting statutory minors. The traditionally crucial, but now nearly negligible, difference between Fa- and Mo- turns on the gender (not biology) of the consenting person. Simultaneously having two fathers or two mothers is no profound metaphor but a numerical observation (no longer impossible), just as father/mother become mutually tautological. Is parental unit a pejorative colloquialism, or an exact synonym for parent-- precise because it excludes the irrelevant distinction between Fa- and Mo-? If identifying a person as either he or she has no tether to what the fastidious call an essence, then neither father nor mother have any essential significance.
For the burgeoning contention, English teachers, like Strunk & White, are not in an auspicious position, despite their real responsibility. Language changes, and-- like the Académie Française -- more than successful communication must be invoked. As should be obvious, the conflict about pronouns is minimally linguistic-- even if the evolution of language is cited repeatedly to quell opposition. The linguistic issues deserve attention in order to discern the actual disagreement. Proclaimed dissatisfaction with standard English pronouns rests on two phenomena of the English pronoun system.
First, communication of individuality does not require immediate expression of idiosyncrasy. Pronouns sufficiently refer to a noun without indicating information unique to that noun. English pronouns tag only irreducible information-- number, gender and grammatical role in the immediate utterance. Functionally, they rely on the reader/hearer to hold all other relevant information for the sake of simplicity and clarity in the immediate grammar.
Contemporary claims about identity and the wholesomeness of identity expression chaff at the basic assumption of uniformity. The grammatical assumption of uniformity is ubiquitous to language; in fact, it is commonly inconspicuous without the refinement birthed by academic existentialism. Pronouns are an offense to reason and decency and authenticity. The dignity of each individual demands a proliferation of pronouns that are personal-- each unique as each person. Only AI could keep up with them all. Murmuring about this phenomenon of the pronouns system is theoretical, lofty and irrelevant. The grumbling is not grammatical but ontological; you may change minds, but you can't win that fight.
Second, and with more volatility, English third person singular pronouns specify gender reference as a uniformity in the real world (male, female, non-personal). The present complaint does NOT inherently fault the gender specificity of English pronouns, rather it rejects the use of these gender tags contrary to claims of any person referred to in the third person. The contrivance of neo-pronouns (perhaps, zip/zap/zipper) would expunge gender reference from third person singular pronouns; however, the proliferation of candidates for a set of Standard English neo-pronouns undermines the irreducible uniformity fundamental to pronouns.
The resources of English are binary, as it/it/it's tags the antecedent noun as impersonal-- a thing which cannot exercise consent. Accordingly, the most common practice is swapping pronouns between he/him/his and she/her. The uniformity of pronouns is unchanged, but rendered subjective. People who identify as non-binary frequently resort to the unspecified gender of they/them. They avoid gender but subvert standard pronouns by rendering number incoherent. It is the assumption of a priori binary gender uniformity which vexes the waxing ideology. This grumbling is also not grammatical. It is personal: social, familial and psychological. The uniformity of gender in English pronouns is an offense against reasonable, decent and authentic people. This is a fight you can win by changing minds.
The stakes of this fight must not be misunderstood. People would not lose the ability to communicate, even if they lose the ability to recognize the realities expunged by the new gender ideology. At present English speakers are being asked/nudged/expected to adopt novel but purportedly proper patterns for Standard English. It is confusing, but without sufficient training any language has boggling elements.
Should this little revolution succeed, there will be generations that learn subjective gender pronouns as their first language. They will not stop communicating, rather they will communicate with inconspicuous assumptions that exclude the differences of father/mother, husband/wife, son/daughter and man/woman. Of course they will still understand biology. The birds and the bees involve nothing more than mechanics and instinct, because they lack sentient consent.
Contention Not Confusion
The only confusion in communication arises for those who have not yet been trained to speak properly. More than once I have observed confusion become a polite face-saving double take when the subjective he or she doesn't match the known a priori gender of a person referenced. An English speaker must only be trained to suspend belief in the a priori gender uniformity of pronouns and to anticipate that ambiguity will be cleared up if necessary as the context progresses.
Similarly, the confusion inherent to using they/them for a singular person can be mitigated by stylistic adjustments. It is pure Strunk & White. If one avoids the misbegotten "they is," the speaker can anticipate possible confusion and eliminate any significance for numerical accuracy in a soon to be employed pronoun. Combining such gymnastics with an expectancy of ambiguity in pronoun use, the experience of confusion can be removed. It is not unlike the skill of avoiding final prepositions, as previously remarked upon. It takes practice to learn proper English, just so long as you train yourself to submit to the norms of the Egalitarian Elite. One must simply recognize and appropriate well formed English.
I recently heard a woman in her 50s getting to know a woman in her early 20s. She asked about schooling, career, hometown and family. The younger spoke of her older brother and eldest sibling. She would not say "sister," because that person identifies as non-binary. The older woman's confusion at this diction was obvious, but she continued her inquiry politely, simply asking if the eldest was her brother or sister. "No, they are my sibling and identify as non-binary."
Infelicitously, she had not recognized the younger's previous use of they in referring to the singular eldest sibling. The older woman was not being rigid. The younger was not inarticulate. She had employed the speech strategies that eliminate the confusion often produced by using they/them as singular. A pedant might have been startled by the numerical incongruity of the final clarifying statement, but not because the young woman spoke poorly.
The older woman's training needed only to extend from proper use of pronouns to the new meaning of some nouns. Siblings are not brothers and sisters, unless they consent and so identify themselves. Brothers and sisters are no longer different other than biologically, and interest in that is either irrelevant or neo-prurient. Children do not need to learn about how to honor men as men or women as women within the non-erotic intimacy of sibling relationships, anymore than they will need to differentiate men and women to act chastely in the world at large. Changing the meaning of pronouns and training speakers accordingly will not stop communication, but it will silence expectations and intentions anathema to the gender ideology fermenting among us. This is the point of contention. This is the fight.
This is devastating.
What are society, family and individuals losing today, tomorrow-- men, women, boys, girls, mothers, fathers, siblings, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, the boy down the street, the girl next door? Like Orwell's Newspeak, the preservation of English gendered pronouns combined with the carefully trained denial of gender's a priori and binary character amounts to encoding language with the ontological, sociological, interpersonal and psychological assumptions of the presently fractious gender ideology. This transmogrifying of pronouns is training to establish that ideology as the grammar of understanding. It is a TrueSpeak 1.0.
All the distinctive obligations and opportunities expressed in father/mother, son/daughter, brother/sister, man/woman are shrunk to differing biologies, each managing their own needs and desires. Without the draw of obligations and opportunities-- inherent and exclusive to each of the extraordinary binary-- men and women will be left with their unavoidable vices and vulnerabilities. Gender-- a priori and actual, not a posteriori and aspirational-- will be reduced to that which cannot be overcome. You can refuse your potentialities but-- as we all know-- you can't eliminate your necessities. If you are not trained to be an excellent man, what kind of man will you be? If you are not trained to be an excellent woman?
To pluck just two grapes from the bitter vines, the sex stuff is obvious. As it stands, men now are learning from age 12-- on the daily-- that an erection can ruin your life. This is sustenance for pornography, legalized sex work, lifelong self-absorbtion and building no legacy for no particular nobody. As it stands, women now are learning-- on the monthly-- that menstruation is unhealthy and pregnancy is trauma. That is sustenance for loathing of your own physicality, default chronic health anxiety, alienation from your constant potentiality, and crafting a future no longer than yourself.
The brief and urgently repeatable experiences of eroticism are glorified as dignity's delight, but the decades-long cycles of a life invested with sexuality are documented as elective, problematic and unreliable. Both men and women are practical. They know that their equivalent problems, if combined with someone of the opposite sex, can drive them on to a spectrum between misery and poverty. Both find the other exasperating; neither has a sane reason to think that BOTH ought to be doing something fundamentally different. Eliminate the binary, you eliminate the coherence, and you eliminate the pair. Everyone is an improvising left over piece, with maybe a couple functioning but inexplicable screws or nuts.
The Other Side of History.
Has this already happened to society, marriage, family, friendship and the mingle of digital anonymity? Yes, the secret-sauce has gone thin and been replaced with a descending series of knock-offs, generics and mere substitutes. Honoring, and all that can be embroidered only on that fabric, belongs to psychology and etiquette. It is the plastic flower corsage for special persons on infrequent occasions. We are increasingly whittled down to biological psychological cases, needs plus feelings, meat and hunger with pink Himalayan salt but little to drink. Does it really matter how we talk about it?
Are there loyalties, obligations and ambitions that transcend our consent? Are their other people apart from whom we do not succeed over a lifetime? Are there greater interests for our work and character than our particular precious selves? Are there other non-negotiable individuals who must thrive for our accumulated efforts and enduring aspiration to produce a legacy rather than just surplus for whomever anonymously benefits by the "next" after whatever we did before dying? Must we endeavor to love life and take satisfaction in optional consumers and beneficiaries, or can we live to love particular people who have a unique identity in carrying our love forward?
Local government, local culture, even local agriculture will be different when done for our grandchildren. This is the kernel of the "seventh generation principle" parroted by movers and shakers who have presumed an obligation/ambition to steward localities which are not their own. Individuals, families and local folk think differently when great-grandchildren become obligations and ambitions well before their own grandparents are born. Convenience sounds offensive and silly, when the scale of your personal aspirations is 150 years rather than the decade you think about ad seriatim (all-on-your-barren-lonesome during your likely 75 years). It is family in the multi-generational pattern which can prove that localism is not snobbery but just plain rich sense.
However much copulation and however many live births-- a nation of gender-subjective people will not build families, because they will have no words for fathers and mothers. Just as they will have no word for themselves, except unique. They will have nothing larger than desire and potential-- individual desire and potential, no matter how crowded the kitchen table gets. Two is a crowd, when the only ways to talk about things are either negotiation or manipulation-- and those two are more easily distinguished in hindsight. How we are trained to speak now, is how the populace will learn to speak. Y'all, you'uns and yinz should refuse to mouth this standardized folly. Don't do that to the people coming after you.
The cresting cohorts (X, millennial, perhaps Z), which remember the differences and gifts of mom and dad, could keep their local nostalgic colloquialisms. They would lose little on the home front (unless they want to push for grandchildren) by endorsing, facilitating and employing the gender-enlightened Standard English. Given how subjective and self-aggrandizing has been our reception of the legacy of our great-grandparents, many will honestly feel like this change must be progress. We obviously failed with what they gave us, perhaps abandoning the whole thing gets us off the hook. Can society and family and mental health really get much worse?
It already did. Let's not talk like it didn't.
Yes, pronouns are a problem. The other side of history is tomorrow. We do have a say.
Much of what needs to be said, not all, must be objective and familial confession.
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