How Pronouns Evolve

[MUSIC]

Brigid Bergin: The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. I'm Brigid Bergin in for Brian today. The English language has been known to evolve, especially when it comes to nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Think just in our lifetimes, how many of us were "slacking our colleagues," or "doordashing our dinners," or "downloading our favorite podcasts" just 5, 10, 15 years ago? Pronouns have generally stayed the same. That is, of course, until we began to use "they" to denote non-binary identity.

Our next guest acknowledges, while it serves a very real linguistic need, many English speakers find it confusing, especially older generations. He's got a suggestion. In fact, it's he's got a whole book about pronouns. Joining us now is John McWhorter, Columbia University Linguistics professor, host of the Lexicon Valley podcast, opinion writer at The New York Times, and the author of the new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. Professor McWhorter, welcome back to WNYC.

Professor John McWhorter: Always happy to be here. Thank you, Brigid.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, we're going to talk about pronouns, so we'll take your calls on two tracks. Yes, we'll definitely talk about the pronoun "they" as the first-person singular. We want to hear from listeners who use that pronoun for themselves. When did you make the change? What's been the hardest part when writing or communicating? What do you want others to know? The number 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692.

We also know some Brian Lehrer Show fans are just straight-up grammar nerds. I say that with love. What have you always wanted to ask a linguistics expert? Call with your questions. Again, 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can also text at that number.

Professor McWhorter, you write about how nouns are updated all the time. iPhone, NFT. There are new verbs like email, text, and ping, and new adjectives like ginormous and cringe. That's not the case with pronouns. How come they are so stagnant?

Professor John McWhorter: Well, pronouns are words, technically, but they're a very special kind of word. They're more like the nails, the screws, the traffic lights of language. They're very deep-seated. We use them very, very frequently. After you've named, you're going to talk about a chair, or Henrietta, or the tariff, after that, you say he, she, it, she, he, it, and you say it over and over. What that means is that, despite what a fun notion it is that we create a new, for example, non-binary pronoun, just the novelty of it, how progressive it would feel, you can't create a new one.

A small in group might learn how to wangle it, and that's just fine, but ze or heesh, as in he/she, which was popular for a hot minute, and co, and other attempts, they're nifty, but they would never catch on among the general population because pronouns are just like-- It's like our fingers. You can't control how you walk, for example. We need to recruit something from what we already have, and hence the whole modern "they" story.

Brigid Bergin: Let's talk about the singular "they". You write.

It goes back to the Middle Ages because of how strong and natural the impulse is to have a way of expressing a generic one, while also thinking of this one as being one of many. Can you give us an example of how deep rooted this is, or maybe how it's most frequently used?

Professor John McWhorter: Sure. Vanity Fair, it's a better read than you might think. It's too long, like most novels back then were, but Thackeray, "A person can't help their birth. A person can't help their birth." Perfectly ordinary sentence. If anything, in a British accent, including a bad one, it sounds elegant. If Thackeray could do it, then how come we can't? Jane Austen, all the great writers used what we call singular "they". Certain grammarians decided to take off against it, depending on how you date it, in about 1745, but it really takes off in the late 1700s.

There's this idea that instead you're supposed to use he, because supposedly that encompasses the she's. After that, it becomes you try he or she, or she or he, or you self-consciously alternate between the he and the she. Language doesn't work this way. English had taken care of it a long time ago by using "their" as gender neutral.

It's easy to say, "Well, no, they means plural." That's true in Latin, which is what all those early grammarians were thinking was the best language in the world. It's a nice idea, but I don't think it's a universal concept anymore that Latin is the most important language in the world. "They" is plural in Latin. In English, "they" ended up switch-hitting, and here we are. Singular "they", many people have had a problem with it for a long time. Even in, say, 2015, a lot of editors were beginning to get a little more flexible about it. I think that was a good thing because Chaucer was flexible about it.

Brigid Bergin: I want to bring in a listener, Amy, in Manhattan. She has--

Amy: [crostalk]

Brigid Bergin: Amy, are you there?

Amy: Yes.

Brigid Bergin: Great. Amy has, I think, the money question here that we are talking about when it comes to "they". Go for it, Amy.

Amy: Yes, I am so glad to have a chance to talk to professor, especially on the quarter. Well, I'm going to start with not my main point because I thought for a while that maybe we could come up with a new pronoun, which would be something like s/he, with maybe a slash between the s and the he. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Brigid Bergin: Well, Amy, go ahead. Why don't you ask the question that you told our screener is your main question?

Amy: Yes, the first point. Maybe we can use they/them/their as the unspecific gender pronoun. I'm sorry, I got alarm on my--

Professor John McWhorter: [crosstalk]

Brigid Bergin: No problem, Amy. I'm going to jump in and just maybe, Amy, I'm not going to try to put words in your mouth, but you tell me if I'm getting your question correct, which I think was something along the lines of how "they", being both singular and plural, can be confusing. Is there a way that we can tweak it to make it less confusing? Did I get it right, Amy?

Amy: I would say, well, I have a suggestion which is when "they" refers to just one person, to use the singular verb "they is" and "they says," things like that.

Brigid Bergin: Amy, thank you for your question.

Professor John McWhorter: Yes, Amy.

Brigid Bergin: Go ahead, Professor.

Professor John McWhorter: I get it. I completely agree. I actually make that suggestion in the book that maybe we can say "they wants" instead of "they want" when it is one person. I say that, frankly, that takes a page from Black English, which ever more influences standard English anyway. It would make it less confusing for those of us who are working to wrap our heads and our tongues around the new usage, but sometimes stumble.

My impression, Amy, from test driving that with, say, students and in conversations, et cetera, since I've written the book, is a lot of people really resist it because they think it sounds nonstandard. They think it sounds like slang. I personally would hope people might get past that because if you just said "they wants," then it would be so much less confusing. We also have to distinguish between speech and writing. It's one thing to write s/he and some people might argue with that aesthetically, but when we write, we're doing it slowly. It's deliberate. That might work.

The question what do you do when you're talking? I think the truth is what we're going to do when we're talking is just get used to a very new way of thinking of "they". In writing, there are all sorts of pathways we could take.

Brigid Bergin: Well, let's talk about that for a moment before we move on to some of the other pronouns. You make a suggestion that when "they" refers to a gender-neutral person, you write, "Why not capitalize it?" Can you tell us more about that suggestion and what you hope it will do?

Professor John McWhorter: Yes, that's an important one because I would really hope if I could wave a magic wand, that's what we would do in writing. Of course, it would have anything to do with speech. If you're referring to one specific person in that non-binary usage, I think that we should just use a capital T because in any written passage that you see where you're confused how the theys work, that takes care of it.

The objection, of course, and this is something I frankly put originally in the Times piece, and it didn't make it through, really, the problem is that what about at the beginning of sentences where "they" would be capitalized anyway? I would say it's not that there's no such thing as editing.

I would say that as opposed to a lot of the, frankly, slightly crazy things in sources like Strunk & White, I would say good editing would mean that you would try to keep a non-binary "they" away from the beginning of the sentence, using an adverb or something like that, so that you could make sure that in that case, the capital letter meant that it was a non-binary person or that you're trying to call attention away from the gender.

I think it would be really handy. It would take some getting used to, but then again, we always capitalize I and we don't have any problem with it just because we're so used to it. Why is it capitalized? The reasons are quite medieval, really. We would be just fine today if it were lowercase. Well, we can have a capitalized I, then why not capital T they when it's the new "they"? that's my perhaps modest proposal suggestion for that.

Brigid Bergin: Professor McWhorter, you dig a little bit into the history of why we started capitalizing I. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Professor John McWhorter: Yes, it was the funniest thing. It used to be that writing was handwriting. Even if you were very careful monk, the way that you wrote an I was just a scratch down, like [choking sound]-- Then the way that you wrote an M was three scratches close together. You can imagine how that would work, so [three choking sounds] An N was [two choking sounds], and you looked like that, too. That meant that if you got a little sloppy, it could be hard to tell what the I was.

There are two solutions. Either you put a dot on it. That's why there's the dot. If you think about it, who thought that up? What's it for? That's the dot. Or, you capitalize it so that it's clear that it's I as opposed to part of an M or an N. Now, all that was very nice when everything was quill and ink on parchment, or skin, or whatever it was. Once you've got printing, none of that really matters but conventions settle in. Language is so conservative. Now we have the capital I. If anything, we think it's pretty, but really, it all goes back to things nobody's had to think about since long before electricity, penicillin, or psychotherapy. Yet, here we are.

Brigid Bergin: [chuckles] Professor, I love your sound effects. My only recommendation is we need to come up with one for the dot. You can make those slash sounds and then a little dot.

Professor John McWhorter: The dot sound is this. "Tink" is the dot.

Brigid Bergin: Perfect. I want to go to Rachel in Nyack, who's going to help us set up questions around the next set of pronouns. Rachel, thanks for calling.

Rachel: Hi. Thank you. When I was a little girl, and I'm 65 now, my mom taught me a rule about when you use "I" and when you use "me"-

Professor John McWhorter: There we go.

Rachel: -such as you and I, and you and me. Got that so far?

Professor John McWhorter: Yes.

Rachel: All I notice now is that people just say you and me all the time, which drives me crazy because I-- I feel like I've lost the rule, but what I recall is something sort of, "you and I fixed the TV." She would say, "Then think, would you say, you and I fixed it? Would you say you and me fixed it? Is that right? Does that sound right?" I go, "No, not you and me fixed it. No, you and I fixed it."

Then she'd give me an example of when putting me in there sounded grammatically correct. I guess it was not a rule. It was just she taught me by the way it sounded and how that made it grammatically correct, but what is the rule itself?

Professor John McWhorter: Well, the official rule, just like there's a rule that in the summer you have to wear little ankle-length socks instead of tube socks for no real reason, the rule is supposedly that when "I" is a subject, it has to be "I." When it's an object, then you use "me." You're supposed to say, you and I fix the TV, because even though deep down most of us want to say, and always any child says, you and me fix the TV, you wouldn't say, me fix the TV. That's supposed to be a mic drop understanding.

Truth to tell, people have been saying, you and me fix the TV or you and me fix the bench for long ago, since the 1600s. People started complaining about it in the 1700s. It's not something new. It's not that grammar isn't being taught. It's that that's the way English works as opposed to the way Latin works. There are some people in periwigs dying of yellow fever who thought that English was supposed to pattern like Latin, because Latin is wonderful.

In Latin, you would say if they had television sets, Romulus and I fixed yon television set, but here in English, as in French, it doesn't work that way. We are taught that you're not supposed to say, you and me fix the TV, because you don't say, me fix the TV but that's not how English works. English doesn't divide I and me between subject and object as neatly as many people think. I have to say, again, people started saying, you and me fixed the TV in the 1600s, not in the sloppy 1960s or something like that. We just have to know.

I'm sitting here, I'm talking on the radio. I hope I don't slip into a "him and me went to the store" because you're not supposed to, just like I'm wearing deodorant. The truth is, real English, it's perfectly fine to say, Billy and me went to the store, and you know it, partly because any child of any type starts that way. Then you bop them on the back of the head and start teaching them to say something unnatural. We get so good at it out of embarrassment that we actually think it's the way the language works.

I know that sounds like I'm being pushy, or that linguists are too permissive, or that I'm coming from the hard left or something like that. Then again, remember, a lot of people think of me as a Republican conservative. It couldn't be that. It's just that it's the way English works. That is the answer to the TV.

Brigid Bergin: I am going to skip to one that's basically just an excuse for me to play a Sabrina Carpenter song. That's the word "thou." Let's listen to a very recent and rather funny example of that pronoun.

[MUSIC - Sabrina Carpenter: Bad Chem]

Sabrina Carpenta: Said, you're not in my time zone, but you want to be.

Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?

See it in my mind. Let's fulfill the prophecy.

Brigid Bergin: Maybe that's a little of Sabrina Carpenter's ode to Shakespeare. It's her song Bad Chem. Jokes aside, how did English speakers use "thou" and even "thee" way back when? It might not be how you expect. Is that right?

Professor John McWhorter: That's a great [chuckles] example. I enjoyed two hours of her in a concert with my 13-year-old not too long ago. I think "thou" is singular "you." One person you would say "thou" to, and then two people you'd say "you" to. If you go into early Middle English, it was even more fun. You say "thou" to one person, you say "yeet" to two people-

Brigid Bergin: Yeet?

Professor John McWhorter: -and then you say "you" to many people. Yes, yeet. The same yeet that now is about throwing something into a basket. Yeet meant you two. We had a nice little array of words for "you." For reasons that are not entirely clear, English didn't want any of that. Now, all we've got is "you," when it used to be that we had "thou," "their," "ye," "you," "yeet, "inc," believe it or not. It was a much richer system. All of a sudden, we don't have anything.

The people who know more than I do about the history of English, and they'll always know more than I do, and they write from great erudition, often they just write as if that's just something that happened and nobody really cares about the reason. All of a sudden, everything just drops out but "you." I say in the book that that is like saying that the Titanic set off from Southampton on whatever it was, April 1912, and never made it to New York. Then you move on and you start talking about Woodrow Wilson, et cetera, and you never discuss why it didn't make it to New York. You want to dig in.

In the chapter, I propose certain reasons why the "thou" would have dropped away, but we used to have a singular "you" just like any other language you've probably ever tried to learn. Listeners, whenever you go to another language, there's a you and a You. Then all of a sudden, in this language, all we've got is you. Weird.

Brigid Bergin: Very weird. Well, I want to bring us back to where this conversation started. Let's go to Hanes in Brooklyn. Hanes. Thanks for calling WNYC.

Hanes: Hi, Professor McWhorter. A former student here. I had a question about the use of the word "they". I find when I'm writing or speaking about someone whose gender is unknown, or I think more recently becoming less relevant to the conversation, I find myself wanting to use the word "they" to refer to them. I was wondering what thoughts you have on that.

Professor John McWhorter: Well, that's just it, that we've been using "they" in that gender neutral way for eons. There are all sorts of sentences where we almost surprise ourselves, and so tell each student that they can come in after 5:00. I gather you were maybe one of my students of whom I would have said that. We're used to "they" having this generic reference. I think, actually, we're beginning to use it more. I certainly am when I'll ask somebody, "Well, can you find out what they meant?"

I'm delicately trying to avoid specifying whether it's a man or a woman just because I feel like that's what we're supposed to be doing nowadays. I don't think that that other person specifies as non-binary or the like. Those sentences go way back. What we're doing is just pushing that a little further with "they". In the same sense, these things end up working as "you" has been pushed because no one would have dreamed that "you" could support all of the weight that it now does back in, say, 1500. Now, we're just going to do the same thing to "they". Context takes care of so much.

Brigid Bergin: Professor McWhorter, I have never had more fun talking about pronouns, I have to say. I want to thank you so much.

Professor John McWhorter: [chuckles] My job is done.

Brigid Bergin: [chuckles] I want to thank you so much for joining me this Morning.

John McWhorter is a Columbia University linguistics professor, host of the Lexicon Valley podcast, and an opinion writer at The New York Times. His new book is titled Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. Professor McWhorter, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for the sound effects.

Professor John McWhorter: [chuckles] Thank you very much, folks. Anytime.

 

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