Pronoun Trouble
The Story of Us in Seven Little Words
By John McWhorter
Avery, 240 pages, $28
For most of us, the very mention of the word pronoun exacerbates the cultural hypertension endemic to our culture. It is helpful, then, that one of our nation’s best writers on language has set his sights squarely on this part of speech in an accessible new book.
John McWhorter has published, in addition to substantial academic works befitting his position as a linguist on the faculty of Columbia University, several popular treatments of language. His last book in this vein, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter Then, Now, and Forever (Avery, 2021), offered a charming tour through the sort of language most of us eschew, or should. This book addresses language none of us can avoid.
Pronouns are, by their very nature, elements of language that are used hard and heavy during ordinary communication. As McWhorter puts it, “these workhorse words become part of our hardwiring. They are among language’s nails, screws. We use them as subconsciously as we walk; they are linguistic basal ganglia.”
While McWhorter has, in his other work, resolutely challenged the assumption that culture and linguistic structure are related, he notes in this book the reality that the fundamental building blocks of our language become internalized to a degree that our terms for less basic things do not.
“As such,” he adds, “to mess with our pronouns is to mess with our sense of the order of things.” McWhorter describes the development of the different pronouns used in languages of common ancestry, demonstrating how one little word in the Proto-Indo-European language spoken thousands of years ago in modern-day Ukraine became English I, French je, Greek ego—and, believe it or not, English me.
I/me is indeed a matter of cases not actually being cases as most of us were taught. Oddly enough, the distinction between the objective and subjective case in English is often not appreciated fully by native speakers until they try to learn another language; in fact, the rules of those languages were in some cases applied retrospectively by those students to their native tongue. Thus the “rule” prohibiting the “dangling participle,” in which a rule of Latin composition (in which sentences must not end in a participle) came to be imposed on English (in which sentences end in participles all the time) by people who did not think English speakers had enough rules to put up with.
The class element of this phenomenon can hardly be ignored; indeed, McWhorter calumniates with no shortage of enthusiasm the “hoary harrumphings” of “grammar scolds” whose “sniffy” attitudes forced native English speakers toward doing very unnatural things like answering the phone with “This is he.”
As it turns out—and this will be a difficult pill for some of us to swallow—the rigid use of I as a subject and me as an object is a behavior that must be learned according to that rule. Why does it have to be learned? Because me isn’t always used as an object, and we come to know this intuitively by growing up speaking the language. Only a pedant, or someone pretending to be one for comic effect, would reply to “Is that you out there” with “Yes, it is I” rather than “Yes, it’s me.”
Thus McWhorter’s book serves to clarify the ways that the very nature of our common tongue makes it difficult to avoid … well, difficulties, when it comes to these little words we use all the time. One might share its insights with, or even buy a copy for, someone especially exercised about pronominal choices.
And people are exercised, aren’t they? Usage of first-personal pronouns is a matter of applying—or not—the rules of “proper grammar” that must be taught to us. But the needle on the cultural Geiger counter starts going haywire when it comes to they and them.
Again, those educated to understand they as exclusive to the third person plural chafe at the violation of the rules they were taught when they hear someone say something like, “They are always the first to fall asleep when the pastor starts preaching.” For one thing, only one person is in view; for another, the verb should be is rather than are to agree with a singular subject. And if the speaker is familiar enough with this person that somnolence is an automatic association, presumably the speaker knows the sex of the sleeper, and can use he or she as appropriate.
Of course, recent decades have seen the cultural development of nonbinary gender identity not merely as spectacle or affectation but as a full-fledged “This is who I am” state of being. Consistent with the expectation that the well-mannered will address people as they wish to be addressed, a Protestant will address a Catholic priest as Father, a Catholic will address a woman wearing purple as Bishop, and a fundamentalist will address a Jewish teacher as Rabbi—even though all of their belief systems mean that their whole heart is not in those appellations.
And it’s not only people with traditional views of human sexuality who will struggle over whether to address a person who says “I use they/them pronouns” as Sir or Ma’am. (I’m reminded that as a newly married person in his mid-20s, I didn’t want to address my in-laws by their first names because they had not invited me to. But I also did not want to address them as Mr. and Mrs. X, as that seemed a bit formal for someone to whom they had said, probably also not with their whole hearts, “Welcome to the family.” For years I just waited to gain eye contact.)
McWhorter explains that because pronouns are such a basic element of our language, efforts to introduce gender-neutral pronouns like ze and hesh are destined to fail (as, indeed, they have outside of some very peculiar cultural spaces). Much more likely is the adaptation of existing words to the needs of what we need them to communicate. Hence the third-person singular usage of they and them that seems to be here to stay.
I am grateful for McWhorter’s proposal to soften this blow by making verbs agree with the number of the pronoun—so, “They wants a cup of coffee” rather than “They want.” But in English verbs follow nouns, and I think the verbal agreement naturally following the articulation of a plural pronoun will be a hard habit to unlearn.
It should not go without saying that McWhorter’s prose is an absolute joy to read. In addition to being clever and witty, McWhorter draws from his extensive knowledge of both high and popular culture to provide examples of the linguistic rules and irregularities he discusses. (This author must note, however, that he missed the opportunity to compare Cookie Monster’s strict usage of me as the first-personal pronoun with Elmo’s abstention from using any first-personal pronouns. Thus, “I want a cookie,” “Me want a cookie,” “Elmo wants a cookie.”)
Pronoun Trouble will both enlighten and delight its readers, especially my fellow readers of The Living Church called to ministries of communication in English. How good and pleasant it will be when we are free to use pronouns without fear. Until then, John McWhorter’s book may, please God, serve to move us in that direction.
The Rev. Jason A. Poling serves as rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Maryland, and as director of the Doctor of Ministry program at St. Mary’s Ecumenical Institute in Baltimore.
