This post, authored by James Alexander, is republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic
During COVID-19, when it was hard to tell the difference between a virus and a vaccine, it was reassuring to have some sort of certainty. We found certainty, especially in Twitter handles and on Zoom conversations, in pronouns. Everyone seemed to know who he/she/they was or were.
I still find the pronoun business a bit odd. I noted in a recent piece that Julius Caesar, who always spoke of himself in the third person, obviously preferred the pronouns He/Him to I/Me. An ingenious below-the-liner called PeterM observed that even if the Woke afficionados do claim pronouns for themselves they should not be allowed to lay claim to our verbs. I had written, “They use they/them pronouns,” and I was told by PeterM that I should have written, “They uses they/them pronouns.” Bravo.
The truth about pronouns is, of course, that they are almost entirely rubbish.
My pronouns are ‘I/Me’. And so are yours. Or I/Me/Me/Mine if one wants to echo George Harrison. But NB: only I use these pronouns. Aye, there is a logic:
I can be an I, a You, or a He.
- Only I can refer to myself as I. (Note: no gender.)
- You, of course, refer to me as You. (Note: no gender.)
- They, naturally, refer to me as Him. (Note: here is gender.)
I don’t gender myself, you don’t gender me, but they gender me. (Genderise? genderate? engender? genduflect?) Is this significant? Yes. Because there is only one me, there are only a few of you, but there are many of them, damn ‘em.
It seems to me that ‘My Pronouns’ should = I/Me.
These are mine, the ones I use.
But there is no need for me to mention this to anyone. It is obvious.
If I have to make an issue of something, it is surely about what you should call me.
And here the choice is between siz and sen in Turkish, between sie and du in German, between vous and tu in French. The first, in each case, is formal and hierarchical, the second is egalitarian. The first is also, in each case, plural, the second singular. Vous is hierarchical and plural, tu is egalitarian and singular.
Often we speakers of English pat ourselves on the back for bypassing such decisions, about whether to vous or tu someone. We cock-sparrer chirpy and cocky English think that we are by comparison so egalitarian.
De’il! Pas! Nicht!
Have you ever considered that the English bypassed the class-divide of second person pronouns by applying – not the egalitarian pronoun, but the hierarchical pronoun – to everyone?
Yes, indeed.
We do not address each other as Thou and Thee, as we probably should have done. We address each other as You. Even the single person. But:
Thou/thee = second person singular.
You/you = second person plural.
Originally, ‘you’ was an address to everyone in the class, and ‘thou’ was an intimate word to one child.
We may mock the ‘Royal We’ but we flatter everyone in England’s Great Puffed-Up Democracy when we speak to them with the ‘Royal You’. This is an irony which is quite magnificent, and may explain the cognitive hypocrisy for which Perfidious Albionans are so famous.
I don’t know when this happened, but back in the 17th century and in some places, if D.H. Lawrence is right, up to the 20th, we still had Thee and Thou between husband and wife. And, as the great Ian Robinson observed, we also used Thou for God. Thy kingdom come.
Odd language, eh? We use the informal singular for God, and yet use the formal plural for every Tom, Dick and Harry. Hallowed by thy name. Fuck off you twerp.
Hence, the finding: we made a mess of our pronouns long before impertinent little Stonewallers came along.
Of course the fuss of the last 10 or so years is nothing to do with the second person. It is all to do with the third person. And it is where I have to make another argument and explain why it is so offensive.
All those who write ‘He/Him’ (etc.) are being offensive.
For they are not talking about how they intend to speak about themselves. They are not even laying down rules about how you speak to them. They are doing something infinitely more grotesque, which is laying down rules for how everyone should refer to them in the third person. Everyone from Keir Starmer to Wikipedia to Emma Thompson to J.K. Rowling.
E.g. I am a confused man, who not only wants to dress as a woman, but think of myself as a woman, and also get you to accept me as a woman, but also insist that absolutely everyone else on God’s earth shall refer to me as if I am a woman. “If you talk about me, darling, make sure you refer to me as a girl, despite my rugby physique and caveman complexion.”
It is, in a word, imperialist. It enslaves language.
Put that in your rainbow-coloured pipes and smoke it, you Pronoun Imperialists.
Pronouns are a cancer. They display a desire for unregulated growth.
Does anyone know their Hobbes? In his great book, Leviathan, of 1651, Thomas Hobbes suggested that man in a state of nature has a right to everything. Every little human is completely independent, completely without law, and so blessedly unlimited: therefore he, or she, can take, or try to take, anything he or she wants. This, of course, leads to war. Hence the need for Hobbes to come and tell us what to do about this chaotic and violent scenario.
The pronoun business is a sort of egocentric reversal of this. Instead of trying to take everything in the world for oneself, we turn out paltry selves inside out and try to spray-gun the entire world with our petty identitarian demands. Each and every Pronountestant, every one of them, is trying to insist that everyone in the world should refer to them this way when they refer to them in the third person.
Imperialism!
“I have a right to control how I am referred to!”
This is my argument against pronouns. It is grotesquely imperialist. And I say this to wind up Leftists who probably think of themselves as Black-Lives-Matter Rainbow-Flag Anti-Imperialists. Is it not grotesquely imperialist to insist that everyone, everywhere, will refer to you in such a way as to indulge your little foible?
Let it be said. We should never have let any of this out of the closet. It should have been cabinned, cribbed and confined (that’s Macbeth) permanently. But once let out of the closet the miasma spread, and all the politically-correct and nice and dimwittedly liberal handwaving spread the miasma even further. Now it is everywhere, and the bad smell cannot easily be put back in the bottle.
James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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