A look at a fraught topic: pronouns

YEARS ago, when my younger daughter, Madeline, started a new job at the Public Theater in New York, the employees sat in a circle and were asked to share their names and pronouns.

- John McWhorter Avery

Nervous about making a good impression on her first day, Madeline panicked and suddenly couldn't remember what a pronoun was. “After”? “Quickly”? “Tree”?

John McWhorter to the rescue! This week the Columbia University linguist publishes a witty book called Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.

Back when McWhorter started this book, the subject must have sounded a bit abstruse, but in a weird coincidence with reactionary politics, pronouns now feel hotter than climate change. After Trump's executive order “Restoring Biological Truth,” government employees were ordered to scrub pronouns from their email signatures. Suddenly, “they” could get you fired.

“To mess with our pronouns,” McWhorter writes, “is to mess with our sense of the order of things, what’s up and what's down - life itself.” We're naturally possessive about our pronouns. But he acknowledges early on, “My positions on these matters do not stem from any ‘conservatism’ with which I am sometimes associated.” Indeed, he’s a descriptive linguist, a scholar interested in observing the evolution of language, not railing against its perceived misuses.