PRONOUN TROUBLE

They for a singular person? Says the eminent linguist: Why not?

He’s been branded a conservative, but McWhorter, who doesn’t avow the label, is no William Safire. Instead, in this pointed treatise, McWhorter considers the pronouns we use as both historical and ever-changing things, resisting conservatism, linguistic and otherwise: “I am a great fan of the new usage of they, and think it is a very sad thing that we are taught that it is a form of mental debility to use me and other object pronouns as subjects.” He’s not alone: McWhorter enlists a phalanx of English writers to back him up in various usages that became canonically disapproved only when the proto–grammar police set up shop back in Georgian times. Shakespeare, he notes, failed upward by using “Between you and I” in The Merchant of Venice, anticipating a matter that’s still of confusion: When I, and when me? McWhorter traces the sources of confusion all the way back to the evolution of our pronouns in Old English and even earlier: the old uncer, for our, widespread in English, turns up in supposedly unlettered dialects as you-uns, and as for y’all and youse, those are laudable—well, at least not condemnable—survivals of the old dual form in English, which distinguished the singular you (once marked by thou) and the plural, used to address both more than one person and the presumedly socially superior among us. “Really—if English were normal, we would be walking around with our flip-flops and iPhones and Drake and whole-grain pasta calling each other thou,” McWhorter writes. “It would be you that felt increasingly antique.” McWhorter gets deep into the weeds, and it helps to know a little about historical linguistics, but it’s not required.

Fun and instructive—and thou mayest emerge spaking they for that single person standing next to you.