Pronouns have become extremely divisive

One of the most effective television ads last year during Donald Trump’s campaign for president warned voters: “Kamala is for they/them, not you." Less than two weeks after taking office in January, Mr Trump ordered federal employees to remove their preferred pronouns from their email signatures. Videos of lawmakers deliberately addressing their peers with the wrong pronouns subsequently went viral. Parts of speech that used to star mainly in grammar lessons have become controversial political lightning rods.

A new book gives a timely and engaging tour of an overlooked patch of linguistic history. John McWhorter, the author, is a linguist at Columbia University, columnist for the New York Times and author of more than 20 books on language and culture. This book’s title, along with Mr McWhorter’s heterodox views and pugnacity (he is an old-school liberal and has been outspoken on the excesses of the woke left), might lead readers to expect some culture-war bomb-throwing.

Instead, he delivers an erudite jaunt in five chapters, one each for: “I", “you", “we", “he/she/it" and “they". These words carry a heavy load. Other languages, for instance, have separate words for “me and you", “me and them" and “me and those three"; English has just “we". Unlike many other languages, English has no second-person plural. Words such as “y’all", “youse" or the lovely western Pennsylvania “yinz" remain spoken and informal. “You" was once plural, but with the decline of “thou", once the second-person singular, it now assumes both roles.

Mr McWhorter is no stickler for propriety—a linguist, in his view, describes rather than prescribes—and he delights in slaying sacred cows. He argues, for instance, that the prohibition against saying “Joe and me went to lunch" is “English’s fakest rule", because pronouns do not split into subjects and objects as neatly as rule-makers believe. Consider the answer to “Who left the door open?" It might sound odd to say “I" rather than “Me", even though “I" is the subject pronoun.

He also revels in pointing out the randomness of linguistic development. The familiar “she" could have just as easily been “hoo", “oo", “sho" or “shoo" had English gone down a slightly different path. Dominant languages tend to simplify as they absorb speakers of other languages—a process doubtless helped by the de facto standardisation imposed by film, television and other forms of mass communication—but superficial simplicity can mask subtlety. The first-person plural in “We’re going out tonight", said to a friend, is not the same thing as a waiter asking, “And what will we be having tonight?" The former is warm and inclusive, the latter faux-friendly and cloying.

Unlike nouns and verbs, pronouns usually evolve glacially. Anglophones have been using their tidy little set for centuries. But change is not impossible. In Sweden “hen", a gender-neutral pronoun, jumped from academic circles to general use around ten years ago.

Near the end of the book, Mr McWhorter breaks his own rule against prescription and argues staunchly in favour of adopting the singular, gender-neutral “they". He points out that it has been around for centuries: Geoffrey Chaucer used it, as did Jane Austen. The context is new; the usage is old. Some may grumble at the change, but some grumbled at the loss of “thou" several centuries back, and people eventually got used to it.

The most enjoyable part of reading this romp through tiny words is the obvious joy Mr McWhorter takes in telling it. In discussing the most staid words in English, he touches on music and wine. In asides, footnotes and parentheses, he is informal and catty: the effect is of listening to a delightful dinner-party guest. As for his subject, he reminds readers at the end that the story of pronouns, and of language more broadly, is never complete: “Pronouns are the latest stage in something always changing…Our job is to adjust to the inevitable awkwardness of change, in our pronouns as in ourselves."

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