Pronoun Trouble
The Story of Us in Seven Little Words
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With his trademark humor and flair, bestselling linguist John McWhorter busts the myths and shares the history of the most controversial language topic of our times: pronouns
The nature of language is to shift and evolve—but every so often, a new usage creates a whole lot of consternation. These days, pronouns are throwing curveballs, and it matters, because pronoun habits die hard. If you need a refresher from eighth-grade English: Pronouns are short, used endlessly, and serve to point and direct, to orient us as to what is meant about who. Him, not her. Me, not you. Pronouns get a heavy workout, and as such, they become part of our hardwiring. To mess with our pronouns is to mess with us.
But many of today’s hot-button controversies are nonsense. The singular they has been with us since the 1400s and appears in Shakespeare’s works. In fact, many of the supposedly iron-clad rules of grammar are up for debate (Billy and me went to the store is perfectly logical!), and with tasty trivia, unexpected twists, and the weird quirks of early and contemporary English, John McWhorter guides readers on a journey of how our whole collection of these little words emerged and has changed over time.
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This piquant study from McWhorter (Woke Racism), a linguistics professor at Columbia University, explores the twisty history of pronouns. Tracing the etymology of each, McWhorter details, for instance, how the word eg, from the ancient Proto-Indo-European progenitor of most European languages, evolved into I in English, ik in Dutch, and yo in Spanish. English once had several second-person pronouns (thou, thee, ye, you) to distinguish singular/plural and subject/object uses, McWhorter notes, recounting how the imposition of English on Celtic peoples and the arrival of Scandinavian invaders in Britain in the centuries prior to the 1066 Norman invasion kickstarted a gradual simplification process during which large numbers of people learning English as a second language struggled to keep up with such distinctions and settled on only using you. McWhorter defends the use of they to refer to gender nonbinary individuals, pointing out that authors as old as Geoffrey Chaucer used they as a singular pronoun, and arguing that it's futile to resist language's ever-evolving mutations. The etymology fascinates, and light humor enlivens what might in lesser hands become stuffy ("What's with I and me? While he and him are clearly siblings, me seems brought in from somewhere else, like a sibling from Dad's first marriage"). Word nerds will find much to ponder.
