“To mess with our pronouns is to mess with our sense of the order of things, what’s up and what’s down — life itself,” the Columbia University linguist, prolific author, columnist, and podcaster John McWhorter emphasizes in his new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. “Pronouns are used so frequently, so below the level of consciousness, and correspond to categories so fundamental to human experience that they are all deeply resistant to change by fiat.”
Most any language’s limited number of pronouns, so ubiquitous and indispensable for shorthand communication as to be used more or less subconsciously, are particularly resistant to abrupt transmogrification even as they may gradually streamline or grow more complicated depending on context and perhaps, the author suggests, a certain degree of chaos theory. Unapologetically named after a bit in an old Daffy Duck cartoon, and replete with pop cultural touchstones, McWhorter’s volume affectionately showcases an array of vernacular innovation around the world and throughout the ages, from the Americas to the Shetland Islands to Japan, and the ways in which languages and patois almost always organically evolve to fit generation upon generation of real people’s needs, experiences, and pronunciations.
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The contrasting details of different language(s) over time, culminating for now in today’s pronoun controversies, could make for an arduous read. But with the flair of a veteran professor bringing linguistics alive year after year to bleary-eyed undergraduate students and preoccupied podcast listeners alike, McWhorter manages to make an intimidating topic zestier, more accessible, and more provocative than might reasonably be expected.
And it is, mind you, about as touchy a subject as exists, especially for a man employed by Columbia University and the New York Times. It was sometime in 2005, in a library at Brown University, that I first realized gender theory was likely to become the next great front in America’s culture wars. I was studying alone, but nearby, a transgender woman began holding court on postmodern gender gnosticism before a couple of enraptured white girls who nodded along, enthralled. Gender was purely arbitrary and entirely socially constructed, they preached, an oppressive stricture imposed by the hateful patriarchy for domination and control. True social justice would entail abandoning the barbaric practice of assigning gender at birth and dispensing once and for all with the pernicious fiction that there were any meaningful differences across the obsolete gender binary.
I’d heard variations on that sort of line before, and it didn’t usually bother me. I’m generally a live-and-let-live kind of guy, and even though the theory captured precisely none of my experience as a garden-variety heterosexual male, I could believe that it was the authentic sensibility of a small subset of the population. But what troubled me was that this particular evangelist had left no room for living and letting live: theirs was a crusading faith, seeking to replace rather than supplement the conversation. And a time would come when infidels would need to be reeducated, or worse. The dogma wasn’t going to play well in Peoria, that was for sure, and a confrontation down the line seemed inevitable.
