The specialitude ratchet
Success! This is exactly the goal.
Yesssssssss – because if you endeavour to commit someone’s Special Pronouns to memory, that means you’re devoting extra time and attention and effort to that someone. Achievement unlocked! Getting people to pay extra attention to Self is the goal here and it’s working!
They’re so special, they get bespoke grammar rules!
Also, this is the Saturday reminder. Just how many reminders are there per week?
7, obviously.
I recently came across a discussion on a surprising new phenomenon people in education were noticing. Teenagers are starting to use they/them pronouns almost all the time. Authors. Characters. Politicians. Famous people referred to in class discussions — didn’t matter who. “Tell me something about Shakespeare.” “They wrote Hamlet.”
Two explanations were being bandied about. First, that it’s possible that young people today are trying to minimize gender, to make the culture more egalitarian. Eliminate she/he distinctions. But the more popular hypothesis— and the one I back — is that they’re scared. They’re protecting themselves from accidentally misgendering people, or from being perceived as someone who makes assumptions about who’s a man or woman based on how they look. GC students and teachers report that it’s gotten very vicious, the policing around transgender issues is rigid and doesn’t respect friendship or anything else. Any hint of “transphobia,” you can be ruined — not just with the rest of the school, but in a social media pile on. They’ve all seen it happen.
“They/them” is relatively safe because it won’t misgender too badly, and it shows vigilance.
If this is true, it’s horrible.
You know what’s safer? Nouns. “Tell me something about Shakespeare.” “Shakespeare wrote Hamlet“. Though they don’t seem to know the name of the work should be italicized (or capitalized, often). So it usually comes out as: “they wrote hamlet. they lived in stratford. they were a player at the globe theater in london.”
I have been trying to get my students to break the pronoun habit and include nouns in their writing at least now and then. That is a battle I am losing, but I plan to keep fighting until they drag my bloodied body off the field and plop it in an unmarked grave with the only marker saying “Dead TERF, good riddance”.
I expect my epitaph will read the same. “Here lies a nameless transphobe. They died friendless.”
Aren’t nouns an avoidance of doing dutiful pronouns? And with pronouns used in this way, aren’t they more like nouns, or names?
Nouns? Don’t you mean names? “Shakespeare” isn’t a noun but a name.
It used to be considered very rude to refer to people by pronouns too often or too early in the conversation. “Who’s she, the cat’s mother?” was a rebuke of that habit.
Sastra – oh godddddddddddd that’s depressing.
@6 I remember being corrected for calling my mother, grandmother, aunts, etc. ‘she’ with that very rebuke. I used to tell them “you know who I’m taking about” in my compounded rudeness. My, how times have changed.
“Who’s she, the cat’s mother?”
As kids we often received a variation of that rebuke (“She, being the cat’s grandmother?”) when people were clearly waffling around their inability to remember someone’s name.
I guess if the yutes of wokedom have their way, the saying will have to become “They being the cat’s grand-thingies?”
The cat’s non-binaries.
I struggle in my writing not to use the name too many times, to use pronouns without being too unclear, because sometimes it’s difficult. Which of the women in the room is “she”? And using the name every time sounds stilted and awkward, maybe even a bit pretentious. But using nothing but pronouns is a problem, which is what my students do. Names, nouns, all fall to the wayside. Everything is “they” or “it”. Which can lead to some hilariously funny answers when they have been referring to two or three things or people without anything but pronouns and they manage to match something in such a way it appears to apply to the wrong person/place/thing. One student a couple of years ago wrote an entire paper about the probe to the sun without ever saying who launched the probe except “they”.
I’m not sure if that’s more or less depressing than the inability to get singular and plural right. “Scientist discovered…” I thought that was a typo the first time I saw it, until 24 students, every student in the class, did the exact same thing. I guess they needed the ‘s’ for spelling desert “dessert”.
This is your Saturday reminder that names are nouns.
God, that’s insufferable.
Thanks, Nullius. I was trying not to be pedantic. I probably will stop trying in a few days and just go back to my comfortable old self.
When I was in High Scool, more years ago than I like to remember, when anyone gave “they” as an answer, they were immediately asked, “Who is they”? We were being taught to be precise.
iknklast: The inner pedant can never be truly eradicated, and ignoring it only makes the eventual eruption worse. Hey, it’s kinda like The Babadook. If you haven’t seen that one, I highly recommend it. I’m not sure, since I haven’t actually enumerated them in a while, but it may be in my top ten films.
11 & 12 etc, I know, I remembered a few minutes later that names are “proper nouns,” or at least so I was taught, but in the vernacular we don’t generally refer to names as nouns (or do we?), so I was asking if I should do an edit.
I’ve always referred to them as nouns. I came from a long line of English teachers, and it was their insistence that proper nouns be referred to as nouns. i don’t think that’s changed, but then, I haven’t taken an English class in [x] years, other than my writing degree. Which never covered grammar, because grammar is of little importance to education anymore, apparently.
Huh, that’s odd. I don’t think I’ve encountered it before. We don’t ask people “what’s her noun?” or the like. “Noun” feels very…thingy, and humans tend to bristle at being spoken of in a thingy way.
We also don’t ask people what adjective their paint is. We ask about its color. Color words are a subset of adjectives; names are a subset of nouns.
It’s just odd in general to ask about after someone or something’s [part of speech]. As you say, it’s very “thingy” and awkward. I think the bizarreness of it is part of why people are thrown off kilter by the pronoun brigade. That’s just not how the language works, so we don’t even have a basic schema for interpretation/interaction.
Quite so. “My pronouns” – it’s so Martian.
Nullius in Verba:
“That’s just not how the language works, so we don’t even have a basic schema for interpretation/interaction.”
! ! !
if only there were a way to get it through to the magic-mermaids that they don’t possess even a hint of the most childishly basic schema . . .
maybe if we phrased it in fairy tale lingo: “once upon a time, when very basic ideas caused you trouble, the inability to use the language you were raised with was clearly indicative of more serious problems”