The podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss is sometimes worth listening to. Sometimes, when the episode is on politics, it's a little too ... well, nevermind. And when it's not about politics, I'm often not interested. But I was interested to listen to John McWhorter on pronouns, discussing his new book. Here's the episode.
One of the main things Weiss thinks will be controversial about the book is McWhorter's argument for using "they" as a singular pronoun. As he points out in the episode, this was been occurring in certain ways for a very long time. I think he says since Chaucer. McWhorter gives an example, something like: "Each student needs to pick up their paper at the end of class." McWhorter is right that few people—but there are some!—would object to such a usage of singular "their." As he recognizes, that's a different thing than the way "they/them" is being used now as a gender-neutral pronoun. McWhorter doesn't define that difference (not in this podcast, as far as I remember, but probably he does in his book), but I guess it would be that "they" has long been used as a gender-neutral pronoun for an indefinite antecedent. What is now happening is that some definite human beings are identifying as themselves gender-neutral, and they are claiming the gender-neutral "they" as their pronoun. It is this type of usage that has provoked criticism or resistance, and I myself find it grammatically awkward and confusing. I'm sure that McWhorter is right that given time and practice, such awkwardness and confusion would disappear.
But I also find McWhorter's surmise interesting—or maybe "surmise" is the wrong word; his wondering? it's not a prediction—that perhaps in movies made in the 2050s, this use of "they" for a single and definite person will be used to signal that the story takes place in the 2020s. In other words, perhaps this new singular "they" won't catch on and will just be a passing fad. We'll see.
Weiss says at one point in the episode that using "he/him" for a biological female or "she/her" for a biological male is a much bigger deal than using singular "they/them." And I see her point, but I find it much easier to do. With the caveat that I have known very few transgender people in my time, I have little problem using preferred pronouns. I see it as a matter of courtesy. But singular "they/them" is different, in my mind, because of the grammatical issue. I guess in a way it's like singular elohim in Hebrew, which happens all over the Hebrew Bible (e.g., the first verse of Genesis). But it's a little different, also, because singular elohim takes a singular verbal form, whereas in English singular "they" takes a plural verbal form: "they are" rather than "they is."
McWhorter says a lot of interesting things in this episode; I just wish I could remember them all. Should have written them down.
One thing I do remember is the discussion about how everyone is bisexual these days. This comes at about 45:00 in the video. McWhorter simply mentions the fact as an interesting new phenomenon, and Weiss (who is married to a woman) suggests that being bisexual is simply the "in" thing these days, something that accrues social-capital. She may be somewhat frustrated by this phenomenon, because at one point she jokingly compares it to "stolen valor" from homosexuals. I myself wonder, though, whether she's being a little too cynical. Well, actually, no: cynicism is almost always warranted when it comes to human motivations. But I do wonder whether, without a constraining force (such as religion or some other ethical system prohibiting certain behaviors), people would naturally feel no reason to preliminarily limit to a particular class the kinds of people to whom they may be attracted. Once upon a time, in the not-too-distant-past, many people in America would have preliminarily limited their potential romantic partners to people exhibiting a particular skin color, but that idea has mostly waned by now. In some contexts, people limit their potential romantic partners (not necessarily sexual partners) to a particular social class, but in other contexts (societies) that is not much of a concern. (Maybe I'm being naive; maybe social class is always a concern.) In the context of sexuality, I think about ancient Greece and Rome. Of course, for the most part I think they (Socrates, for example) would not have identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual because they didn't think about sexuality as an identity-issue.
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