“We comes from God, I from the Devil.” —Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
“We don’t say blind spot any more just FYI, it’s ableist,” tweeted The Good Place actress and former English teacher Jameela Jamil, adding between some forgiving heart emojis that she herself “only recently learned this.” It’ll be replaced by the phrase “dead angle,” wrote the author of a now-locked Twitter activist account whose bio carries the slogan-demand “Make it Accessible or Burn it Down.” The activist’s tweet continued: “Use it till other people conform.”
So, the plan is to order the initiated to talk a certain way around the uninitiated until we are all speaking the same way. You and I will become one big right-thinking “we.”
How instructive pronouns can be. I just reread a 2007 Slate column by Christopher Hitchens, titled “The You Decade.” Hitchens griped that advertisers, propagandists, sloganeers, aphorists, etc. had recently begun stressing the second person. Hitch hated the Rite-Aid button stating, to anyone who happened to read it, that “YOU are the most important customer I will serve today.” He hated “We report. You decide.” He hated “Your country needs you.”
His complaint wasn’t so much that writers were pandering (though they were) as it was that readers’ imaginations had to fail for the pandering to work. To find “you” rhetoric appealing, one must fail to notice that it “omits all the other ‘you’ targets who would otherwise mutate rather swiftly and disconcertingly into ‘them.’” Your call is not really important to the recording assuring you it is.
A dozen years on, we “we” a lot. “We don’t” say something means “you may not” say it. And this enveloping rhetoric, the verbal inclusion in a group you have no choice but to join, is supposed to read as friendly. It is now the first person plural pronoun that pricks at the imagination of the even mildly curious reader.
But can “we” question whether it makes sense to call “blind spot” ableist when it actually has nothing to do with blind people? (It refers to a spot in every able eye where the optic nerve passes through. If you’re reading this, you have one.) If we have quibbles with one of these linguistic diktats that appear apparently out of nowhere, to whom can we appeal? Wait, who is “we,” and when did I join this collective? When did you? Who decides its policies? Shh. We don’t talk about that. We certainly don’t wonder whether it’s really just a bunch of squabbling academics and poseur activists clamoring for social status by innovating new and increasingly absurd ways to hector people. We would never.
—By Nicholas Clairmont
