Professor John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, is one of the more recent and more engaging arrivals to the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. While his interests are not confined to linguistic topics, his treatment of them has a refreshing precision within the context of the increasingly imprecise prose of the paper’s news stories. McWhorter’s essay is called “In Praise of New Pronouns”. Its principal subject is the growing use of the plural pronouns they, them, and their with singular subjects. This development is somewhat similar to the long-established colloquial use of the second person as an indeterminate. “To make an omelet, you take your eggs and…” The they/them phenomenon is of course related to heightened social sensitivities concerning transgendered persons, a subject that has in a relatively short time become prominent and controversial. McWhorter makes the point that it is the natural tendency of language to change, and he finds this change helpful. I would point out that much of linguistic change is as mysterious as it is constant. Lexical change is the easier part to grasp. New words are constantly being added by invention or taken on permanent loan from other languages. Our language in particular owes a great deal to its magpie tendencies. American English has been as generous and welcoming as our immigration policies. Word meanings mutate, expand, fall away. Some words disappear altogether. Changes in grammatical usage, generally gradual, are also constant. Most mysterious of all is phonological change—that is, changes in the pronunciation of the spoken language. Although we lack such evidence as modern sound recording can now ensure, we are pretty confident that we have reconstructed the English sounds of five hundred and a thousand years ago. The differences are, to put it mildly, dramatic. If we know some of the what of phonological change, the why remains largely speculative guess work. But trying to understand linguistic change is different from trying to coerce it.
Monday’s paper had several letters responding to McWhorter’s column, which garnered general praise if not uniform agreement. I hope it is possible to continue to talk about this topic in a rational and courteous way, as he does. People generally seek to accommodate the reasonable desires of their neighbors and fellow citizens, and I would hope to do so on an individual basis whenever possible. But the radical impositions suddenly imposed by fiat upon long established languages—such as those imposed on French by the Jacobins or on Russian by the Bolsheviks—are not encouraging models. It is worth thinking about. Note in the first place that it is by no means all pronouns that are proving problematic. Debaters often say that while their opponents are allowed to have their own opinions, they cannot claim their own facts. The “pronoun controversy” is not unrelated to the opinion/fact calculus. That is, are pronouns more along the lines of facts, or of opinions? When people announce “their” pronouns, it is a very limited pronominal repertory, only the personal pronouns, and not even all of them. The first-person pronouns enjoy a relative clarity and a relative freedom from controversy. Even people who are often of two minds about things are likely to use the first person singular when speaking of themselves. Exceptions are rare and reserved for a few very special cases. The Queen of England gets a royal plural (“We are not amused”), and perhaps also people suffering from dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder (MPD)—but only if in possession of the appropriate form signed and notarized, from his/her/their shrink. I have from experience discovered one other exception: health-care workers involved with geriatrics. “Time for our bath”.
What all the fuss is about is the third person singular forms of the gendered personal pronouns: he and she. These were pretty mysterious words long before the invention of gender theory. What its speakers have called “English” is a very old language that has undergone such radical mutations that its earliest surviving written texts are unintelligible to all native English-speakers but a few experts who have made a special study of them. Old English (roughly the state of the language before the Norman Invasion at the end of the eleventh century) was highly inflected, maintained grammatical gender in its nouns, and had a quite complex verbal system. The nominative third-person singular pronominal forms were he (masculine), heo (feminine), and hit (neuter). Where, then, did she come from? That is actually a bit of a mystery. If you are into Good Reads, I recommend the article “she” in the Oxford English Dictionary. I lean to the belief that it was through influence from the definite article (se, masculine; seo, feminine). In the personal pronouns the s appears only in the feminine nominative. She has her own pronoun, as he has his. But perhaps I am influenced by my Portuguese Duolingo course. In Portuguese the gendered definite articles are in certain circumstances used to mean her, him, or them as well.
Actually, most of us habitually do choose some of our own pronouns, and without much comment from others. As an English professor the ones I have found most embattled are the relative pronouns: who, whom, whose, which, and that. There may still be some general agreement concerning the use of who and whom at the theoretical level if not in general speech practice. but that and which seem to be losing the grammatical roles once assigned to them. Many influences led me to my life’s work, but two of them were public school teachers, one in Taft CA and the other in Mount Pleasant TX, who loved the English language and the grammatical conventions of those who spoke and wrote it well. As late as the 1950s one of those conventions was to be pretty religious about using that when introducing restrictive clauses and which when introducing non-restrictive clauses. But the rule, which is generally useful, is not one that commands blind obedience. You get the idea. These days most of us do pick and choose more or less as we please.
But some who revel in breaking free of the restraints of grammatical correctness want us to succumb to the shackles of political correctness. Language must serve many functions, but one of the most vital is to talk about the empirical world as we actually experience it. There are limits to the extent that the social experience of the centuries can be coerced or abolished. Hence I speak of and enjoy a beautiful sunrise or sunset. Even I have enough elementary astronomy to know that the description of observed reality is not the same as a scientific one. But linguistic innovation leading to manifest absurdity is of limited utility.
Imagine that you are the sole witness to a crime. You saw a violent incident on the street. Two people seemed to be arguing. One of them pulled out a gun and shot the other one to death. You are absolutely confident in what you saw, and that you would be able to help the police identify the killer. In the police investigation, the following dialogue ensues.
Police Investigator: Can you describe the perpetrator?
Witness: Yes, about six four, two hundred and twenty-five pounds, three-piece suit, receding hairline and thin, graying hair, probably about fifty years old. Caucasian.
Police Investigator: Man or woman?
Witness: Certainly.
Police Investigator: No, I mean was it a man or a woman?
Witness: Dunno. It all happened so fast I didn’t have time to ask for their pronouns.
It is an old legal adage, or at least used to be, that hard cases make bad law. That is perhaps why linguistic change has, on the whole, been slow and consensual, rarely abandoning common sense.
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