Human language has been around for at least several hundred thousand years, possibly for a couple of million years, linguist John McWhorter reminds his readers in Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. McWhorter explores how pronouns developed and work in the English language, with wide reference to, and comparison with, many of the world’s seven thousand other languages. These “languages divide the world and its concepts up in endless ways,” he writes, often in ways that sound strange to the ears of an English-language speaker. In a dialect of Kurdish, for example, it is normal to say the equivalent of “him went.” A native Kurdish speaker would use the “subject” pronoun, the counterpart to our “he,” only with verbs that act on something. McWhorter doesn’t want English speakers to start talking like Kurds. His linguistic point is that “it is not a bedrock principle of being a language that pronouns always serve either as subjects or objects.”
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McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University, is the host of the podcast Lexicon Valley, and writes a weekly column for The New York Times. He has authored 23 books and appeared most recently in these pages with a charming review of an Ira Gershwin biography (“Here to Stay,” Winter 2024/25). He informs his readers that he writes not only as a “linguist” but as a “commentator.” As a linguist, he is a “scientist” who has been “taught to describe the way people talk without judgment.” As a commentator, he “has an opinion, [and] offers counsel.” His opinions and counsel do not therefore represent his linguistic science, which is purely descriptive. As a commentator, he advises his readers that he will be anything but impartial and that his partiality does not come from any “conservatism” with which he is sometimes associated. His example: “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.”
The fun-loving spirit of McWhorter’s new book is revealed in the first paragraph with a detailed account of a Looney Tunes short starring Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Elmer Fudd, from which the title of the book, Pronoun Trouble, is derived. Such references to, and uses of, popular culture abound in the book: It’s a Wonderful Life, Schoolhouse Rock! shorts from the 1970s, Here’s Lucy, an old Twilight Zone episode, The Simpsons, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Blackadder, Legally Blonde, and many more. Chapter titles, like the book’s title, display the lighthearted joshing that animates practically every other sentence. The seven little words that tell the story of us are “I,” “you,” “we,” “he,” “she,” “it,” and “they.” These are what McWhorter would call the “subject” forms of all current English personal pronouns. He has a chapter, or part of a chapter, for each one (he, she, it get jammed into a single chapter):
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The “Your Highness” of I-ness
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Poor Little You
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We Persisted
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S-He-It Happens
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They Was Plural
Afterword: What’s Yourn Is Mine
McWhorter enjoys the oddities, puzzles, and kinks of language. Why do we say “aren’t I,” as in “I am a bald cook, aren’t I?” Rather than “amn’t I”? That is, why do we use the plural form of the verb for the singular first person subject pronoun? McWhorter explains how over centuries the grammatically logical “amn’t” became “aren’t” in a series of mistaken impressions. To compound the entertaining illogic of language, “aren’t I” sounds fine to all native English speakers, but “I aren’t” sounds immediately like some illiterate backwoodsman. There are dozens of such pronoun riddles and revelations throughout the book: toddlers quite rationally begin to think of themselves as “you” because that is how others refer to them; developments in a personal pronoun explain “why Ned is the nickname for Ed…Nellie for Ellen, Nan for Anne, and…Nabby for Abby,” nicknames which would otherwise make no sense; understanding Shakespeare’s Othello or Merchant of Venice can be enhanced by familiarity with the uses of “you” and “thou”; and so on.
It is because pronouns are so important, our “linguistic basal ganglia,” that they stir up so much trouble. New nouns, verbs, and adjectives are the norm, but “there are never” new pronouns, writes McWhorter, and almost never new prepositions, conjunctions, or articles for that matter. In his studies of a language called Kusunda, spoken fluently by just one person in Nepal at the time of his writing, McWhorter finds a strong example of how enduring pronouns tend to be compared with other elements of human language. “People really, really like their pronouns to stay the same.”
As testimony to how quickly and bigly language can change, especially where pronouns are not concerned, one of our editors told me the other day that his 15-year-old regularly says things like “cap,” “goated,” “mad buss,” and “low-key selling.” I didn’t know what any of these things meant until I Grokked them. I didn’t know what Grokking was until a few months ago. It didn’t exist, except as a little-known verb coined by Robert Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). I can remember when “cringe” as an adjective sounded completely new and foreign to my ear. Even now, I couldn’t use the term without sounding like an old guy trying too hard to be with it. It sounds normal and established when I hear young friends throwing it around among themselves, but my guess is they would feel a little self-conscious or uncertain using it when addressing an oldster like me.
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So, what is this “new usage of they” of which McWhorter the non-conservative commentator is such a great fan? According to McWhorter, “The most challenging new development in pronoun usage in the history of the English language is the use of ‘they’ in reference to a specific person.” English speakers, aside from some grammar curmudgeons for whom he has contempt, don’t struggle much with “Tell each one they can come in.” But every sentient English speaker (at least those who are over 30 and are not LGBTQ+ activists) will be jarred by “Jocelyn paints their nails themselves.” Or:
A. Where’s Tyler?
B. They just left.
“This, folks, is new,” writes McWhorter. The usage “became widespread in the 2010s, with the American Dialect Society designating they as the Word of the Year in 2015 followed by Merriam-Webster’s in 2019.” “They” became a niche choice when powerful authorities began asking people, “What are your pronouns?”
McWhorter acknowledges that it can be difficult, especially for people over 30, to adjust to this new usage in casual conversation. It can feel like speaking a foreign language, and in certain circles to make a “mistake” (my quotation marks) can seem somehow not just bad manners but immoral. And he acknowledges that the usage can produce some head-scratching results even in writing that is carefully edited. He gives an extended example of a New Yorker profile of literary scholar Judith Butler, whose preferred pronouns are they/them. Deferring to Butler’s preference produced the sentence:
Butler, a prominent critic of Zionism, responded by citing their education in a Jewish ethical tradition, which compelled them to speak in the face of injustice.
Whose education? Who were compelled? From here, McWhorter quotes at length several other passages creating one escalating confusion after another by uses of they/their/them to refer to the singular person Judith Butler. And it is not just the confusion that is troubling, McWhorter acknowledges, it is that the insistence on “they” as your personal pronoun “feels imposed, like a command,” a “new social requirement.” But he still takes this command as a necessity:
[A]t the end of the day, changes in our culture are such that we need a gender-neutral pronoun in English. We need to join the Chinese and the Japanese and the Finns on this. It’s going to feel new, it’s going to feel imposed, and it’s also going to feel a little ambiguous—because we have to use they. And that’s because the alternative of a brand-new gender-neutral specific pronoun will almost certainly never get off the ground.
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McWhorter admires the diligent efforts of people who have proposed other solutions—“ze,” “hesh,” etc.—but argues that they have virtually no chance of becoming standard because pronouns “are all deeply resistant to change by fiat.” But he thinks the new “they” not only has a chance but is necessary, sensible, decent—even highly praiseworthy—and the way of the future. To oppose the new usage would be both fruitless and despicable. “[W]e must [emphasis added] accustom ourselves to using they in a new way,” McWhorter writes. “‘Jocelyn and she were the first ones in the room’ is no more or less natural than ‘Jocelyn paints their nails themselves.’ It’s just that we’re less accustomed to it.” It’s promising or at least entertaining to see McWhorter invoke the standard of nature on the question. But in the end, history is his standard: “There is all indication, from where I sit at this writing, that the new they is the future.”
McWhorter the non-conservative commentator thinks that this imposition, command, social requirement, necessity, or historical inevitability should be treated as an obligation of good manners. “[T]he request to be called ‘they’ entails the courtesy that one complies.” To resist, to fail to “adjust” to the new “they,” in the progressive commentator’s view, risks making you someone “a later age looks upon, justifiably, in derision.” He could be right about what the future holds, but a great deal depends on who are the makers of manners in America’s future. “O Kate,” said the young king Henry V to French princess Katherine who was to become his queen,
nice customs curtsy to great kings. Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion: we are the makers of manners, Kate.
In a heartwarming, if belated, affirmation of our republicanism, nationwide rallies this past June 14 informed us that America has “No Kings!” Trans flags flew over many of the rallies, making sure the rubes understood that though kings were out of fashion in America, we must “Celebrate Queens!” The “makers of manners” in America and the West for the past several generations have been the progressive, liberal, and now woke elite—in our universities, government, media, and corporations. The makers of manners are the ruling authorities, what Aristotle would have called the “regime.” John McWhorter, the non-conservative commentator, speaks on this question for the currently reigning woke regime in America and the West. He is, in his polite way and within his modest limits, a maker of manners with respect to the English language.
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In America, as was commonly said from the beginning, the people are king. The people, under the laws of nature and nature’s God, are supposed to be sovereign here—they are supposed to be the makers of manners. But for several generations manners have been imposed on the people by a royal elite who eventually became unbearably arrogant. Pronoun troubles seem to many of the sovereign people to be only a symptom of much larger troubles that violate God’s laws, human nature, and the sovereignty of the people: parents being threatened if they dare to interfere with the sexual mutilation of their minor children; American girls being forced to compete in sports against biological males; American daughters being forced to welcome biological men into their bathrooms and showers. These things mattered so much to the sovereign people that pronouns became a major theme in the 2024 presidential election.
Great resistance spread across the land in the early 2020s when news got out that the Biden Administration was launching an “all of government,” “all of society” project to impose the command on all federal employees to address other employees by the pronouns they preferred regardless of their biological sex, and to allow employees to use whatever restrooms aligned with their preferred gender. Employees were officially instructed to avoid “gendered” terms like “wife,” “husband,” “mother,” father,” “son,” “daughter” in favor of non-gendered terms like “spouse” and “child.” Employees were also officially instructed to use “they/them” if an “individual’s pronouns” were not known. Protests and legal challenges arose, some accusing the Biden Administration, among other things, of violating women’s rights in sports and single-sex spaces—like bathrooms, showers, and women’s dorms and prisons. The “all of society” range of the project brought the power of the federal government to bear on universities (where little compulsion was needed), schools, businesses, hospitals, and sports leagues, to compel them to do the “courteous” thing under threat of heavy penalty.
As a result, some future historian might write at least a short chapter on the 2024 presidential election titled “The Pronoun Election.” The most widely discussed and maybe the most influential political advertisement in the campaign showed young black men talking about how Kamala Harris supports compulsory use of their tax dollars to pay for sex change operations for prison inmates, combined with clips of Harris saying with unctuous sincerity “every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access” to sex change operations funded by your tax dollars. Then come pictures of a giant man among diminutive girls on a basketball court, and the narrator saying, “Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports.” Then, with a picture of Biden appointee and serial luggage-stealing LGBTQ+ activist Sam Brinton in full shaved-head-big-red-lipstick mode and Biden’s celebrated transgender surgeon general Rachel Levine in the background, the narrator concludes: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” The ad ran almost 55,000 times in the first two weeks of October, 30,000 of those airing in swing states, typically during NFL and college football games and NASCAR races.
What made the ad effective? A constitutional majority of Americans had learned over a couple of decades that not only would they be socially stigmatized and ostracized, but they could lose their jobs, be expelled from school, fined, or even put in jail for not conforming to the new usage—for “misgendering” someone. They saw that the “request to be called they” was no request at all: it was a threat, backed up by the mob and by an unaccountable regime that supported the mob. And they saw that the greatest evil entailed in complying with this “request” was the saying of what they all knew was not true. They saw clearly that Kamala Harris supported the aggressive pronoun monitors and enforcers who would compel their fellow citizens to address a biological male as they/them, or she/her, or ma’am, if that was his whim. A biological woman, if it was her whim, must be addressed as them, or him, or sir—under threat of potentially severe penalties. Parents—no longer to be called fathers or mothers—could lose custody of their minor children (no longer to be called sons or daughters) if they “misgendered” them.
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In response to the clear voice of the sovereign people who elected him, on January 20, 2025, his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order asserting that “sex” in federal policies is “male or female” based on biological classification at birth, explicitly rejecting gender identity as separate from biological sex:
[I]deologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers…. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself….
It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality….
“Gender ideology” replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true….
Each agency should therefore give the terms “sex”, “male”, “female”, “men”, “women”, “boys” and “girls” the meanings set forth in section 2 of this order.
Federal agencies were directed to remove references to gender identity, including pronouns, from official materials. Federal employees were officially permitted to use pronouns consistent with the biological sex of persons and to refuse to employ pronouns preferred by individuals that were inconsistent with their biological sex.
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As President Trump likes to say, “We’ll have to see what happens.” The regime of public and private authorities—the makers of manners—that Trump was elected to replace is largely, as John McWhorter says, on the side of they/them. And everyone has seen for the past ten years that this regime is overwhelmingly powerful and will fight to the death before relinquishing power. As the sovereign people now request their fellow citizens to call a man a man and a woman a woman, let us hope—you and I, we, he, she, (it?), and especially they—that the former makers of manners have the courtesy to comply with the request, lest our pronoun troubles become a pronoun war.
