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- [00:00]
A
We're in a really interesting time there because it's no longer a rarity to know someone who was born as one gender and now identifies as something else. And it requires a mental exercise of thinking about your use of pronouns when it's usually not what you think about. You think about your use of real words, not the pronouns. It's like having to think about the way you walk. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
- [00:37]
B
My guest today is a well known writer and an old friend of this podcast and of persuasion, John McWhirter. John, of course, is one of the most incisive cultural commentators of this moment. I learned a lot from his last book about identity politics, but he is a trained linguist who is a professor of of linguistics at Columbia University, and that is the domain that his new book is all about. It is called Pronoun the Story of Us in Seven Little Words. It's a delightful read and it set us up for a really interesting conversation about whether languages should be prescriptive or descriptive, whether we should have preferences, for example, about literally how much we misuse the word literally. We talked about how pronouns in the English language are different from the usage in other languages, why it is that English has a certain poverty of pronouns, very few pronouns compared to other languages, like German, for example. We talked about the controversial rise of the singular pronoun of whether there is something grammatically wrong with saying they to generically describe a student whose gender you are not specifying, and whether or not we should accept they as a marker of pronouns for a particular person instead of he or she. Spoiler alert. John argues that we should not resist this, that that is a perfectly appropriate use of language. I also poofed him on other attempts to innovate language for political concerns. When Germans, for example, introduce new words of nouns to avoid using a generic masculine when you talk about students in the plural, which in German grammatically implies that the men, even for people, might not necessarily be picturing a lecture hall full of men. And finally, in the part of the conversation of reserved for our paying members, we revisit the concerns of John's previous book, Woke Racism. We ask about whether or not Wokeness has run out of steam, how John sees the backlash against Wokeness, including in the executive action of the Trump administration, and of course, how we might be able to build a more philosophically liberal consensus that avoids the accesses of the woke left and the quote unquote, woke right to listen to that part of the conversation. Please support this podcast. Please allow us to have more conversations with wonderful guests like John, please become a paying subscriber by going to yashamonk.substack.com that is yashamunk.substack.com. John McWhirter, welcome back to the podcast.
- [03:46]
A
Great to be here, Jasa.
- [03:48]
B
The last time you were on this podcast, we had a conversation about your excellent book about what you call wokeness, about the identity synthesis. This time we're talking about your latest book, which is a lot more fun, I have to say, in part because the subject is a lot more fun, which is pronouns. And there's a little bit of political stuff that comes in. You have a discussion of the most controversial pronoun of this moment, the singular plural of they. But for the most part, it is not about kind of political issues. You know, why should we care about pronouns? What do pronouns tell us about the English language? Why are they worth thinking about?
- [04:25]
A
That's a good question. And really, I wrote Pronoun Trouble because Woke Racism was, I thought, a necessary book, but it was a very angry book. And after I write angry books, I always like to do some kind of linguistics confection dessert book. And that's what this was supposed to be. So pronouns are interesting because it's this compact set of words that all have interesting histories and that do tie into historical issues and political issues. Although to tell you the truth, when I wrote the book two years ago, I had no idea that we'd be talking about trans issues with the tone that we're talking about them today, so that the they them would be connected to that. I was just writing about it more from the jolly linguist perspective. But yeah, pronouns are hot. They're hot little words.
- [05:09]
B
One of the things that I think pervades the book in an interesting way, and it might be worth mentioning before we delve into some of these pronouns, is a kind of general attitude towards language. One of my favorite facts about linguistics, which you know much more about than I do, of course, is that in English. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, claims that it is a dictionary of usage, that it's trying to track which words have become established enough that they're going to be around for a while. But there's nothing prescriptive about it. The preface to the French Dictionary published by the Academie Francaise says, or at least used to say, I believe it still does that. After taking into advice the opinions of learned bodies like the French College of Physicians and so on about what kind of words we might add, we decide sovereignly what is and is not A word in the French language. So that's a very different kind of attitude. You don't have a kind of prescriptivist attitude towards pronouns. Right. You're quite skeptical about a lot of the kind of supposed rules that people have about what is the right usage and what is the wrong usage. Tell us about that.
- [06:17]
A
Yeah, Linguists in general, this isn't just me, but linguists are definitely descriptive. And our idea is that language is interesting and interesting as in complicated and nuanced the way it is. And to decree that the language should be a certain way, the judgments are almost always arbitrary. And more to the point, especially when we're talking about speech rather than writing, those prescriptions almost never work. And so the Academie Francaise is a. An august institution. You kind of wish you could be part of it, but they have next to no real effect whatsoever. And that's true of all of the academies, including the one in Germany that's trying to avoid the number of English words that are creating something called denglish never has any effect. Things are just going to happen, and so it's better to just be along for the ride. And pronouns don't do what you would expect them to do. If, for example, you. You are a periwigged person somewhere in London, somewhere in the late 1700s, deciding that English should be like Latin, that's nice. But the way English pronouns actually work is every bit as interesting as the way they happen to work in Latin.
- [07:23]
B
And so one of those examples that I think is rooted in this sort of long veneration for Latin is that a lot of people are going to say, I am misspeaking when I say me and John are recording a podcast, even though that's quite a natural occlusion that comes naturally to English speakers. What is the case against it? Why does that tick people off? And they say, you should say I and John. And why do you think they're wrong about that?
- [07:47]
A
Well, that's one of those things, because it seems so normal to people that if you say, billy and me went to the store, then you should be able to say, me went to the store. And if you don't, you shouldn't say, billy and me went to the store. And the truth is that that whole idea is something that some people came up with in the 1700s, thinking that English should be like Latin, where you would not say, Billy and me or Williams or whatever, and me went to the store. You would say Billy and I. But in other languages, such as French, and the French don't consider their language Sloppy it would be Guillaume et moi went to the store and the world keeps spinning and nobody bats an eye. And so it's a misanalysis of English based on a now rather antique veneration of Latin and Ancient Greek. That means that we feel self conscious in saying something like, yasha and me are doing a podcast. It's preferably perfectly ordinary English, just like it's perfectly ordinary French. Only in the 1700s and then thereafter were people taught that there was something wrong with it. And you know, you get pretty good at saying, yasha and I are doing a podcast. It really is. It becomes effortless. But it has nothing to do with the way English grammar works. And you know, we can't fix that. There is no way that people are gonna start feeling okay saying, him and me were in the store when doing a radio show or making a speech. It's just like people wore top hats in the book. I compare it to the idea that in the summer you're supposed to wear little tiny ankle length socks instead of tube socks. That doesn't make any sense. It would almost be better to have the tube socks, but that's just the way it is. But we should realize that when someone says, him and me goes to the store, it's not because they're ignorant. It's not because they're breaking some rule. It's just that we have an artificial rule that we've been taught to observe. So that's the Yacha and me story.
- [09:38]
B
And there's a kind of slight element, potentially at least, of class critique in that, right? That a lot of the time when there is that kind of prescriptive rule, it is a rule that you are cultured into as you go through a formal education and you learn that it is in fact incorrect to say me and John are recording a podcast, and then you show off your greater erudition by saying John and I. So is that sort of part of a concern here? That really you're never going to fully change the language or you're unlikely to fully change the language. But you might say, oh, these people over there are uncultured, they're not speaking correctly, and there's sort of something wrong with them as a result?
- [10:21]
A
Yeah, there is definitely some of that in it. Especially because classism is more tolerated in enlightened, at least American culture than racism is. And so classism gives that aspect of the human sentiment a kind of event. And so, yeah, to say, he and I went to the store and to get to the point that you can do it without really thinking is kind of like learning ballroom dance. Or in the old days that the cultivated person was expected to at least pretend to play the piano. Or until very recently, someone like me was expected to at least be able to pretend to speak French. It was a class marker. And that's what this Billy and I ends up being. You pride yourself on having learned the trick, and it's a handy way to look down on people who haven't. And so, yeah, it gives us a way of being classist now that we can't carry walking sticks and parasols and things like that.
- [11:16]
B
Yeah, obviously there is a racial dimension to this. And part of that racial dimension is that there is a distinctive dialogue of American English which is spoken among many communities of African Americans. And in a similar kind of way, people often say, oh, that's wrong English, or there's something wrong with that. And you, in the context of pronouns, but also in other contexts, have often defended that as saying, no, that's just a dialect. In the same way that there's regional dialects or other kind of dialects, and there's nothing inherently better or worse in that way of approaching the language.
- [11:48]
A
Yeah, it's an argument that I frankly think is often not properly made. Because if you say, if that's their way of speaking and it's part of their culture, if you criticize it, then you're a racist, you're criticizing them. And a person might think, no, it's actually non racist for me to say, you need to speak better. It means I'm being honest and I'm trying to bring them into the greater resources of society. But the truth is, typically people speak both black English and Standard English depending on the context, and they don't think about it consciously, but that's the way it goes. And more to the point, it's that black English is not broken English in any scientific sense. In many ways, it's more complicated than standard English. There are a lot of interesting things about it. And so black English is not illegitimate English any more than Bavarian German is illegitimate High German. They're just variations on a theme. They have different social meanings. But that doesn't mean that there's anything inherently broken about non standard dialects.
- [12:48]
B
There's a lot of Germans who will disagree with that about Bavarian. But coming from Munich, I of course agree.
- [12:54]
A
You know what I mean?
- [12:57]
B
How do we think about sort of, are there any elements of language usage we can oppose? Is there anything where you say that's a better use of language or a worse use of language? Certainly I imagine that when you're composing your articles, you're thinking, how can I speak? Write more elegantly? What is the right word choice? And so on. Where does the distinction lie between sort of being a weird, top hatted prescriptivist who's going around telling people how to speak and giving up any of the joys we take in expressing ourselves better or worse? Right. I mean, to take an example that is not directly from pronoun trouble, when I think in some dictionary, one of the definitions of literally has now become figuratively because people literally, over time say literally when what we mean is, but it didn't literally happen. Do you think I can sort of oppose that use of literally because it just robs that word of useful meaning when it's used in that kind of unthinking way? Are there some things in the language where you would have a sort of slightly curmudgeonly attitude? Or do you think, look, if people use literally just as a word of emphasis, as just saying very or extremely or whatever, we should just roll with it? Nothing is lost here,
- [14:14]
A
barely. And it's because what's important is whether or not meaning comes through and that usage of literally to mean its opposite. As frustrating as it is for many people, it's not that anybody doesn't understand what someone means when they say, I was literally dying of thirst. When they're standing in front of you and obviously did not die. What that comes down to is a word like fast. So a rabbit runs fast, but then you can say, the chair was screwed fast to the floor. Those are two different meanings of fast that would never confuse anybody. You can seed a watermelon. That means that you're taking the seeds out. You can seed the ground, you're putting the seeds in. There are about 75 of those pairs in English. And you would never think of it literally. It's just one of them. And so there are just little areas of the language always that don't make logical sense like that, but they don't confuse because language is all about context. Now, aesthetically, kind of like, you know, language frankly is like the physiology of a cat. Then there's a cat show. Now, do I ever go to the cat show in ways that are arbitrary? Like, for example, you could say, you can't just walk into the room and start yelling. That's an ordinary English sentence. You can't just walk into the room and start yelling. What most people say for some reason with just. Just that word is you just can't walk into the room and Start yelling, you just can't walk into the room. To me, that's wrong. What you're saying is you can't simply walk into the room. If you say you just can't, what you're saying is you absolutely can't. For some moral reason, that wrinkle bothers me. I have noticed people saying, you just can't in old movies, and so it's not new, but it's always struck me as illogical. However, no one has ever been confused by it. It's just a wrinkle in the language, and I need to get over it. But, yes, I'm a human, but. But I would never say everybody stopped saying this because one, they wouldn't, and two, there's no reason to tell them to stop because the meaning is always clear.
- [16:12]
B
So let me hazard a mild pushback here. You can explain to me why I'm wrong about this. I agree with you that a lot of the time it's just a question of aesthetic preference. And when you have a new kind of usage for a word, we realize that it still exists in the two contexts, right? So you can express your pleasure about something by saying, it's cool, it's great, it's amazing, or it's rad, which comes from radical. I realize when I say Jean Marie Le Pen was a radical politician, that means different from when my friend who's a ski bum says, that was rad. There's no meaning lost there. It feels to me a little bit different in some of the contexts where we use literally. Because when you're saying, I'm literally starving to death, I agree with you. That doesn't bother me because it's really obvious in that context that you're not actually literally starving to death. But there might be other contexts where I say he literally shouted at me, where it's really useful to have literally as a marker of saying this actually happened. I'm not exaggerating. I'm telling you exactly as it is in the literal sense. This is really what he did. But that might be context where people nowadays are very tempted to just throw it in as a way of saying, he just was very rude. It's just a kind of way of reinforcing the strength of a sentence. But there might be confusion, and we might be losing our ability to denote that something literally happened, which would be a kind of loss. It wouldn't be a horrible thing. The world wouldn't fall apart, but it would be a sort of loss in our ability to express something important about the world. In a concise and elegant way, I.
- [17:54]
A
I see where you're going, but I would really have to say I've never encountered a case of literally where I felt that it was ambiguous. If somebody said he was literally shouting at me, I can't imagine them meaning he was just a little loud and they're speaking colorfully. They would mean the person actually raised their voice. But all languages have little dings in them where there really is no quick way to express something that most languages have. My favorite example of it is in French, where you can't say that something sticks out. And so if you are. You're parking, you have a rental car, and you park it in the lot, and all the cars are parked in a straight line, and you don't really park all the way in, and the back is kind of sticking out, you can say you parked wrong. There are all sorts of things you can say. But you couldn't go to the office and say, mine is the car that's sticking out back there. There's no verb for that. You just can't. You can't do it in Danish. There's not a word that you would specifically use to mean to get liquid off of something. You can't wipe, you can only erase. Everybody does fine. But there are languages. All languages have those sorts of dings. But with literally the idea that it really is creating a kind of ambiguity. I'd have to listen around for that one because maybe. Maybe you're right. I know what you mean about the potential, but I personally haven't seen it happen.
- [19:19]
B
But would it be better to have a language where you figure out a way around those things? Again, it's not like Denmark or France are falling apart because of this. But to use an English word example, the word biweekly really annoys me. And it's not that anybody uses it wrongly. It's not the kind of aesthetic judgment that we sometimes have with something like literally. It's just like they said, let's meet biweekly. Do they mean twice a week, or do they mean once every two weeks? It's really annoying that we've run these two very different concepts into the same language, into the same word in English. If somehow I don't think this is feasibly practical, we could have a language commission that just clarifies this and says biweekly means twice a week. Every two weeks means every two weeks. Do not ever use word biweekly for meaning every two weeks. And we just decide together that that's how we're gonna do going forward. That would solve some problems in the English language.
- [20:04]
A
Yeah. You know, I'm gonna concede that bi weekly and biannual are unfortunate because you really don't know. And it really can create mistakes. I've had lawyers tell me that that's true with sanction. And so sanction is either positive or negative. They say that they don't like that. They wish it could change that one, though. I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect that context takes care of it 99% of the time. But biweekly and biannual. Yeah. Are hard to the point that you have to avoid them. Those are little messes in English. I agree with you on that one.
- [20:36]
B
I'll take that as a great victory. Let's go to the basics of pronouns. What do pronouns accomplish grammatically in a language? And what elements of pronouns are the same in every language? What is it that pronouns do that we're going to do in English and in German and in Chinese and in every other language? And what are the kind of choices that English has made over time about how pronouns work, specifically in English? That might mark it apart from some of his other languages?
- [21:08]
A
Pronouns stand in for nouns. There's no such thing as a human language where you would say, I bought a chair and I put the chair in the living room and I sat in the chair. And every time I look at the chair, I think about the time that I bought the chair. There's no such thing. After you first mention the chair, then you refer to that chair as it. After you first mention Henrietta, you refer to her as she, and so on, or this or that. If you're talking about objects, there is no language in the world where that isn't true. And so no matter what language you're studying or that you've discovered, one of the first things that you're gonna learn about it is what are the stand ins for nouns. How languages differ is in how finely they cut the salami. And so how many different pronouns you have for how many different shades of concept. And if English is unique, it's that as languages go, English is pretty pronoun light. There are languages that take it to a little bit more of an extreme, but to only have I and then you for both singular and plural, and then he, she, it, and they, and that's it. And only he and she are distinguished by gender, but not any of the others. Just that that's a little. A little weak as pronouns go. And that is something that happens in Western Europe to An extent, but English really takes it a long way. We don't have enough. And that's been the grand theme of the development of English pronouns. And so, for example, in German, single you du, and then for the plural, you've got either was it. And then politely sie, we just have you. And that's a very compact set of pronouns that's really overworking poor little you. And English has just been that way for many hundreds of years.
- [22:52]
B
I'm trying to think of a language that would have fewer pronouns. Perhaps Chinese might be one of those.
- [22:58]
A
Nope, because Chinese is nor. Well, all right, it depends on how you count it. They have two U's and so ni for single and then nieman. But then for them, ta is both. He is, is he, she, and it, and so they too. And that's Mandarin, which. It's interesting. Mandarin and English have similar histories in that lots and lots of people have used them as second languages. And when that happens, languages tend to wear down somewhat. And so Mandarin is like that. But once you get into the other Chineses, they have more normal amounts of pronouns. And English is compact in that same way.
- [23:33]
B
Oh, that's a really interesting observation because it obviously came to mind that Chinese, because of the different masculine, feminine and neutral forms all being contained in ta, has very few pronouns, and English, as you're pointing out, as very few pronouns. And it came to my mind that they're very old languages. But we are saying it's less about the age of a language than it is about whether it had to serve as a kind of local lingua franca, which puts pressure towards simplification of language.
- [23:59]
A
Exactly.
- [24:00]
B
Why is it that what are the pronouns that English has lost? When you go back to Shakespeare, when you go back to the Quakers, what kind of pronouns are they using? That has fallen out of usage today.
- [24:15]
A
Real English, if English were normal, we would say thou for one person and you only for more than one person. We would have just as we have he and him, subject and object. We would have thou and the. And there would be those two forms. If English were normal over in the plural, it wouldn't be just you, it would be ye as the subject and you as the object.
- [24:40]
B
And in addition, explain to us what the difference between that ye and that you would be.
- [24:45]
A
Ye was the subject, and so ye sit there, hear ye. For example, you was only the object. And so Helen and Fred, I see you, ye ought to sit down now, we're about to eat. So there were two different forms. Of course, that's not Middle English. But you take the.
- [25:03]
B
So it's like the distinction between we and us.
- [25:06]
A
Precisely, or he and him. That was throughout in a way that would be unfamiliar to us now. And then early Middle English and before wheat and yeet wheat meant we two, we meant me and three, or more or more me and then two or more people. Yeet was you two, and then you was if it was more than you too. And so we had dual pronouns, which many languages have. That was an early Germanic thing. And we kept them and then we let them go.
- [25:41]
B
What about one of the most striking features about pronouns to me in the English language? That is about distinctions of politeness. Many languages encode distinctions of politeness in which pronoun you use. In French, that is tu and vous. In German it is du and sie. Is it a coincidence that English doesn't have those? Does that have roots in some great social egalitarianism in the history of English speaking peoples? But it's not really particularly obvious when you think of the English aristocracy or practices like slavery in the United States. You know, why is it that English lacks that distinction which is so common in other languages?
- [26:21]
A
Yeah, it's a mystery to an extent, because it's something that really starts to fall away in the 1600s, you know, pretty much when Shakespeare is done with it, it starts falling away. It used to be that you would say you to somebody who was above you, and you would say thou to somebody who was below. And then it got to the point where you was the polite form and thou what you use with kids and with intimates. In other words, the normal European language routine. English was normal in having a tu, vous a du, sie a tu usted, all of that. That's what Europe does. But for English, you from the plural just started taking over and became the singular form. And we therefore didn't have polite pronouns. So we can be very explicit and say your highness, or we can address somebody as sir, but we no longer had our vous. And the reason seems to be not the tempting one. I wish that I could have written in the book that it's because of the origins of bourgeois culture among Anglophones and people didn't know what to use with one another because there were so many newcomers in the city or something like that. But all of those things could also explain Oslo, Berlin, Moscow, Rome. Those were things happening all over the European continent. Why in basically London, Oxford and Cambridge, it got to the point that there was no thou, whereas it persisted out in the country. And in some Places still does is partly just that there is a genius of English. And by genius, I mean definition, too, which is that there's an essence to the way English grammar is that was set in place when Vikings beat up the language starting in the 8th century, which is that English likes to take it light. There's a tendency, linguists don't fully understand why some languages are like this and some aren't. But it's certainly the case that some languages kind of want to be a herder, and some languages just would rather have as little furniture as possible. And all languages are always getting complex in various ways. But when it comes to pronouns as well as aspects of verbs, English wants to be left alone. And that has continued with the pronouns right up through eliminating thou completely, rather than maybe making its area narrower, which is what a normal language would have done. And so we just have less stuff. We make do with less stuff.
- [28:41]
B
It's interesting, of course, that when some linguistic convention is older, we naturally associate it with formality, which is a little bit strange because it's not obvious that people were, in general, more formal in the 16th century than they are today, but that's our cultural notation. So if I went around New York today saying, it is very nice to see thou, which would be very odd, but people would think, I mean, A, that I'm a little deranged, but B, that I'm being very, very formal. Right. Whereas, in fact, you're pointing out that thou was the informal form and you was the formal form. But that's not how we would instinctively hear today.
- [29:17]
A
Yeah. It's funny, being the age I am, having grown up in the 70s and 80s and loving teaching myself languages. I remember the thing that you would read with any European language is technically, there's this thou form and this U form in the language. People are using the thou form more and more. And so you would learn in French textbooks, it's not like what you see in old movies. More people call each other du, et cetera. I heard that with German du as well. And that's the way it was in the late 20th century. But the funny thing is, English, you would expect, therefore, if it were that kind of thing, that thou would win. But instead, it was the vous that won, which is exactly what you wouldn't have expected. And yet here we are. Here we are today. Yeah.
- [29:58]
B
To what extent can sort of collective social or political judgments influence the language in that way? A story I've heard about Sweden is that in always a comparatively egalitarian society, but particularly after the 1960s and the 70s and 80s, it really came to be ill seen to use the formal form, and that as a result, the informal form has really taken over in that society. Do you think that that is an organic social development, or can there be these forms of political agency? Are there examples in which either in the case of pronouns or of other really fundamental features of a language, the decision of a king or the decision of some very powerful person fundamentally influences the trajectory of that language, leading at the extreme to something like the loss of a formal form of a pronoun.
- [30:50]
A
Yeah, it's hard to impose things on casual speech as opposed to writing, but where it happens, it's going to tend to be in relatively small, homogenous communities with perhaps a kind of pride. And so that Swedish story is one that took place in what is, in terms of population, a very compact nation, which was, until relatively recently, quite homogenous, with a very distinct sense of its own traditions. And so that kind of fiat, combined with there being a common feeling, literally, among, you know, almost all people, was such that you could chase away the vu form in the sense that they have. That would have been much less likely in Russia. That would have been much less likely in, for example, Saudi Arabia, China, larger and more. Let's leave out Saudi Arabia, but larger and more diverse nations. And so that's why it's so hard to really do it, for example, here in the United States.
- [31:48]
B
Now, you were talking earlier about areas where some useful word might be missing in a language. Like, I believe you said, the word for sticking out in French. There's just no compact way of saying that. You seem to believe that the English use of pronouns has one kind of problem like that, which is that if I am in a room full of people and I say you, it can sometimes be ambiguous whether I mean you, John, or whether I mean all of you people in this room who are hearing what I'm saying right now. And of course, there's instinctive workarounds that people have sometimes created to that problem, like the use of the word your. Is that a problem? In our account English there it feels like you have a preference for reintroducing those kind of words, not necessarily by a linguistic commission headed by some dignitaries, but in a sort of organic way. But you feel like it would be better, or in fact, it is a positive development that it seems like we're getting the re. Emergence of. Of some of those forms, like your.
- [32:46]
A
You know something? I never thought of it this way. And this is always a healthy Way to think, to reclassify things. Talk about a ding in French or a ding in Russian. English's ding is the pronouns. The ding in English is that we don't have a way of saying thou. And so, yeah, we are trying to do it with things like y'. All. And the problem is that once a language is highly codified, standardized, and you see it spontaneously in writing in your head rather than just spoken, it's hard to make fundamental changes like that, especially with pronouns, because they're not really just words. They are tools. They're nails, they're screws, they're blood vessels. And so it's hard to do anything different. And that means that when y' all comes in, it can only be considered slang. It can't be considered a new word that you put in the dictionary without a marking, such as, you know, slang. And therefore, we are trying to be normal, because it really is awkward to not have a way of saying thou. But those ways can never be official. And I think one thing that we're noticing, given the increasing informality in American and also just Western societies in general, is that outside of the south, outside of the black community, y' all is catching on evermore in colloquial circumstances. You can see just. I see the kids at Columbia who, you know, are not often from the south, trying to make this language normal by using y' all to an extent that their equivalents, that is me, when I was in college, were not using it. And that's because we have a ding. And I think it's only gonna get as far as it's gotten also, you guys. But it'll never be standard. But at least we're using it because we did need it.
- [34:28]
B
Yeah. It's interesting even, you know, in my presence in the United states for about 20 years, I feel like 20 years ago, I would have felt like I'm pretending to be a Southerner or something. I would say, y'.
- [34:37]
A
All.
- [34:37]
B
It would have been very strange. Whereas now, I think sometimes in verbal language, I do use it. But, you know, if I was addressing my students at the beginning of the semester and I wrote, hi, y', all, that would still feel very odd to me. I wouldn't do that.
- [34:50]
A
Never. But you could say if you and I were at some conference, you know, will I see y' all at dinner? If you were feeling kind of jolly, that's becoming normal. Yeah. And that's because we need it.
- [35:01]
B
So one of the innovations, one of the things, if you like, in the English language, is that we have trouble expressing certain kinds of plurals. And so we've gotten the introduction of what's called the singular plural, which is controversial in two ways. It is controversial because prescriptivists often dislike that kind of linguistic innovation. So it's controversial in the same kind of way in which you all is controversial, but it's also controversial in a kind of second sense because it has become bound up with the whole debate about gender and questions surrounding trans topics explain to us the nature of a ding. How the singular they may be a solution to that and how we should think about it.
- [35:49]
A
Yeah, there are times when you don't need to refer to gender, and it's hard to feel from English that you don't even need he and she. Context takes care of that 99.9% of the time. They're languages that have never made a difference like that. But we have he and she. But there are times when you really don't need it and there are times when you really don't want it. And so in English, really, since Chaucer, it's been possible to say things like a person can't help their birth, where you don't say his birth, not her birth. Both of those feel too specific. A person can't help their birth. And so that's not new. It's not something people started doing in the 1960s or something like that. That's been just part of what many people thought of as the best English, including the quote unquote, best authors since time immemorial. But grammarians had this idea and once again, it had to do frequently with the worship of Latin and Ancient Greek. There was an idea that they has to be plural because they once only was plural. So if you're going to look at how they is used in Beowulf, okay, it's only plural. But language changes and pronouns change too. And it was long thought that they could be used in the singular. Frankly, if we had a larger corpus of Old English, I would bet quite a lot of money that it was already being used that way then. But it just doesn't happen to be preserved. And so we've had that a long time. And even if the Strunk and White version of things tells us that we're not supposed to say, tell each student that they can hand in their paper after five o'. Clock. We all do. You might not write it, your editor might not let you write it if you write for the public. But everybody says it. Nobody hears anyone say that and thinks, I'm not sure what they mean, do they mean they in the plural or a singular person? So then come to roughly 20, 15 and the non binary person wants a pronoun that makes sense for them. It makes sense to think that we could make up a pronoun, partly because that would be fun. A lot of us like to make up words and make up languages, but a pronoun can't catch on, you can't bring in a new one because they're just, they're not words, they're tools. We use them too often. To use a brand new word like zaganka or something, it just won't work. You can shorten it to K, it still won't work. So what do you have that you can use? There's some languages where they would have had 50 pronouns to choose from that is not us. And so really the only one that makes sense is to refer to non binary procedures people as they. And so we have a job to do because we need to adjust to something that does not feel natural at first, but that I very much think that we can all master with just a little patience and practice.
- [38:28]
B
So that's very interesting because you're kind of taking a middle position in this linguistic question. But it also doubles as a culture war, right? Where on the one side there are the people who say the way to use the English language is he or she. They in this kind of context, it's just really strange. And so to refer to somebody as they is an aberration of the English language. No, no, no, no. That's the kind of logical way of updating for those changed social contexts. On the other hand, there's of course a lot of people who do want to use neopronouns, right, who want to say sie and ses and so it sounds like a German speaking and all kinds of other pronouns that are invented with a kind of political purpose, the purpose of liberation or whatever. Right. But a purpose to sort of represent something but he invented and you're get off your high horse about they as a reference to a person, that's perfectly fine. But cut it out. Trying to invent these pronouns is just never gonna work. Is that roughly right?
- [39:28]
A
Yeah. And it's not that I don't see the fun in the invented pronouns, but Z and all of those are never gonna get any further than Latinx. And you know, Latinx is not illegitimate just because it's only used among artists and intellectuals and activists. Many people seem to think there's something wrong with that, but it's not gonna be used by the Latino person, quote unquote, on the street. That's just not gon. It's the same way with Z. I wish it were otherwise. But that means that we have the challenge of using they, because in speech, especially he, slash, she, she and he, those aren't the way human beings talk. And so we can't use the written strategies. And so that's. That's the they. And I like it partly because I think that it's the right thing to do morally, and also because it does add one more distinction, although with a homonymy in our pronominal system that really has kind of needed them. And also, you don't see language change happening much. Generally, it happens very slowly, but in this case, you actually get to see something happening. And so, for example, if you watch an old movie or if you read old books, the words wonderful and fantastic mean different things. You have to be careful. When someone says, I don't want to be fantastic about this in 1925, they mean, I don't wanna let my imagination run away with me. If somebody in Jane Austen says that something's wonderful, they don't mean that it's great. They mean that it's wondrous, that it's magnificent. It makes you wonder that sort of thing is happening all the time. There's still people who use fantastic in that way, especially literary people and people who are very old. But you can't feel it coming. You can't feel it happening. Whereas with the new they, it happened, as I say in the book, it seemed to pop up sometime between when the TV show the Office ended and Donald Trump came down that escalator, sometime between those two things. And so here we are watching something happen. And for me, I just say, let's watch, because it's not going to stop. It's already too well established, at least among a certain set. And if we are around or among that certain set, it's just something new to accept.
- [41:35]
B
I think one of the things that's interesting about language is that this prescriptivist instinct is very hard to realize that telling people, you should now use the language this way, we've invented a new pronoun or whatever, and it's very hard to make it work. The other thing is that it does seem to betray how we perceive the world, whether we want to perceive the world that way or not, in a way we don't always have full control over. So I have one controversy about pronoun use in mind here. During the last Dutch election campaign. There was a kind of far right politician on a Dutch TV talk show and there was a trans guest who I believe was a male to female trans woman, a natal male who had transitioned to being a woman. And this far right politician sort of deliberately kept saying he as a way to indicate that he did not believe in trans ideology and that he would not pay this person the courtesy of referring to them by their preferred pronoun. And at some point another politician who was invited in this talk show got very annoyed and turned to this far right politician says, stop doing this. This is disgusting. Can't you see that you're hurting him? Referring inadvertently to the trans person by that pronoun. How are you thinking about sort of how the use of pronouns can sort of give us away, can sort of demonstrate that even for this particular more left leaning politician was clearly committed to being courteous to his trans guest, as I would want to be courteous to a trans guest. And at some level does believe that a trans woman is a woman. In that heated moment of linguistic use, it seemed to betray that at some level his mental mapping is a different one.
- [43:29]
A
Yeah. And that can't be denied. We're in a really interesting time there because it's no longer a rarity to know someone who was born as one gender and now identifies as something else. And it requires a mental exercise of thinking about your use of pronouns when it's usually not what you think about. You think about your use of real words, not the pronouns. It's like having to think about the way you walk. And the truth is that usually with trans people, it's rather evident what they were born as. And that has nothing to do with any kind of disapproval. But you can see it and you're used to tying that kind of appearance with a certain pronoun. That's the same kind of work as using the new they. I knew I've only known one person who transitioned. Well, a colleague of mine who went from man to woman. And it took me some years to say she instead of he and to do it spontaneously so that I would never mess up, because I genuinely came to process them as a. As a woman. Took years. That was hard. They would get a little peeved at me for messing up the pronoun, I remember. But it didn't help. It was just, you know, you're mentally locked in. All of us are going to have that issue. And I think most trans people will understand it on some level. Especially that person is upset and they say he because they're really processing a he, even if they respect that the person has decided to identify as she. I think all of us will have similar experiences.
- [45:05]
B
Since I've made the bridge to Europe, there's an interesting set of questions in German that I'd always wanted somebody linguistically expert to give me their opinion on. So I'm gonna abuse this occasion to make you that person. There's a very strong conviction left of center, but to some extent in the German mainstream as well, that certain kind of generic nouns imply that everybody is a man. So, for example, the word for student in the plural is student, and the word for a group of exclusively female student is studenten. And so there's this idea that if you say the lecture hall was full of students of studenten, that implies that they are all men. And so as a result, they now often use a kind of what I believe is a gerundif of which literally is people who are in the process of studying right now in a way that supposedly is more gender neutral, less from a perspective of trans questions in this context than from a perspective of not implying this generic masculine plural form. I would love to hear your opinion on whether you think that the kind of underlying theory of social change holds. Is it actually true that when people today say the aula is wolf von studenten, the auditorium is full of students? What anybody would picture is a room with exclusively male students? And if we successfully get people, as we have to some extent in German to transition towards saying die Wolfenstu direnden, the lecture hall is full of people in the process of studying, that that actually changes sort of what mental image we have in the world, then of course there's an underlying, further aspect of that theory of social change, which is that. And somehow if now my mental image of those students changes, then that makes me think differently of the appropriate role of women in society, or young women might more easily picture themselves as going off to university and pursuing those kind of careers and so on further down the line. Does that seem realistic to you or not?
- [47:25]
A
See, it goes language by language. It's been shown that in French, where you have, for example, ile versus ellen for they so eels for boys, els for girls, that when you use ile in a gender neutral way, it does encourage a picturing more of men than women. You don't spontaneously picture men and women when the word ile is used. Now, if we're talking about a context, I'm flying by the seat of my pants here. We're talking about students. And so studenten. And then Studentenen. I think if you talk about a room full of students based on what today's reality is, studenten, you picture a room full of men and women. You don't picture a room full of guys in a line like they would have been in 1865 in Prussia. Studenten means both. Studentenen. You imagine a room full of girls. There's no way to give a word that would imply that they're all men. Actually it's only women that you could be specific about. If you have some other way of doing it, such as the studiernde. That's clever. Actually. I wonder if that works with everything but studiernde. That means that you're not really picturing gender at all. Will that be better for women? I'm not sure that anything needed to be fixed. Listen to me, an American who has never lived in Germany. But I'm not sure anything needed to be fixed when it comes to student or anything where you could then change it to the gerund. But then again, let's say it wasn't students. Let's say that it was pilots, where you spontaneously imagine male pilots. And so instead pilot. And so pilotinen. I'm just. I'm pretending.
- [49:15]
B
Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Piloten for the plural masculine and pilotinen for the plural feminine. It's interesting. Yeah. So I don't think there in fact is a gerendith in that case. I think that's just one where that happens. Not to. I mean, you could say pilotirinde would be the gerundev, but I've never heard anybody use that. That sounds very cumbersome.
- [49:38]
A
But maybe they should, because then women would be more spontaneously imagining themselves as pilots. It's hard for me to do this because I'm not in the society. I'm all on board with the pronouns, finding gender neutral pronouns, which apparently is happening all over Europe. What is it in German? Zier sier is one that people are using.
- [50:00]
B
Nobody uses that.
- [50:01]
A
You've never heard it?
- [50:02]
B
Well, no. So the solution in German is quite odd to me, which is that in written German you have a little star, what's called a gender stern. Gender star. So it's, you know, to dent star inen. But of course there's no way to represent that star in spoken language. And the thing that I think I believe is doomed exercise, though I'd be interested in hearing your opinion on this, is that what you hear in left leaning, highly educated spaces is a little pause that is meant to represent that gender star. So what People will say naturally is studentinen, but what will we say in those kind of spaces? Student.
- [50:48]
A
That's never going to catch on except in those spaces. Wow. You know, actually I think they use those stars in it's going to sound kind of la de da, but the German translation of woke Racism. And I've gotten a lot of angry mail from Germans who say that the way language is used in the book doesn't sound like me because it's not the way I would put things. But apparently it's that accepted.
- [51:14]
B
That little pause that is very interesting. And I have to say that your publisher should have consulted you on that question. I don't know which way you would have gone, but it is certainly very A usage that is coded is very woke. And so to translate that book into German with a usage that's coded as very woke about consulting you is an interesting editorial choice.
- [51:34]
A
I'm also told that I sound like an angry Prussian general in that book too. And I figure maybe I need to
- [51:40]
B
just that I think is just your true nature. That's nothing to do with your publisher.
- [51:44]
A
That's just me. But yeah, I think I'd have to think harder about the students and the pilots because that's extremely loaded. My sense is that it's not needed in some areas of society, but then in others maybe it would be. I don't know how important it is for women to think of themselves as pilots, because that's not a business that I know much about. But I do know that I've only had one female pilot that I knew of. So yeah, yeah.
- [52:22]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. If you want to listen to the rest of this conversation, in which John and I discuss where we are at with wokeness, whether the influence of this ideology is starting to fade and whether we're likely to get something better in return, or whether we're simply seeing the takeover of a right wing reaction which is just as illiberal in its own ways. Please go to yashamonk.substat.com, support this podcast. Support our ability to bring wonderful conversations like this week's With John to you, that is. Yashamunk.substack.com you will earn access to all of this content. No more annoying little pieces of conversations that you're frustrated not to be able to hear. All of the bonus episodes, including ones in which I answer your questions, a liberation from the annoying ads that will often ring in your ears. And most importantly, you will earn my undying gratitude. Yashanmonk.substandard.com thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you too have been enjoying the podcast, please be like Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to good fight part goodfodmail.com that's good. Fightpodmail.com
- [53:58]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.