Near Savile Row
The title is a story all by itself.
Laurie Penny drops a bomb on The Critic magazine in pronoun row
Pronoun row? Next up: all out nuclear conjunction exchange.
AUTHOR Laurie Penny has criticised Right-wing magazine The Critic as “rude and childish” for failing to use their preferred pronouns.
First sentence, and already we see why pronouns should be accurate as opposed to Crafted to Your Personal Taste. Whose preferred pronouns – the magazine’s? Laurie Penny’s? It’s not clear. That can happen anyway, when there is more than one she or he or they, but using the accurate ones at least keeps those ambiguities to a minimum. Using luxury pronouns does the opposite, with a vengeance.
And then of course there’s “rude and childish.” Which is more rude and childish, The Critic’s use of standard pronouns or Penny’s demand that she get special customized ones that will make the article more irritating to read?
Julie Bindel used the accurate ones, the article goes on, and that just wouldn’t do.
Penny’s publishers Bloomsbury asked that Penny be referred to as “them/ they”. The Critic refused to make the change, instead adding a reference to the request at the foot of the review.
Bloomsbury shouldn’t have asked. Language can’t be customized for individuals in this way without rapidly ceasing to be comprehensible. The whole point of language is to communicate, and specialty pronouns are just roadblocks to that project. Plus it’s all just so narcissistic and self-indulgent and stupid. See Laurie, see Laurie get free publicity by “dropping bombs” over her childish “my pronoun” demands.
Penny told us: “It’s rude, and it’s childish…”
No, what’s rude and childish is to expect special language rules for oneself. That’s rude and childish.
“They want to think of themselves as cool and edgy… it would be nice to see them engage with the actual arguments I’m making.”
Then stop bleating about your stupid pronouns!
If she really wants us to engage with her arguments then she’s a complete fool for distracting everyone with outrage that we don’t call her “they.”
Heh. “Incoming Nor, sir!” “Damn you, Khan. I didn’t want to go there, but you made me. Hit them with all the Yets!”
One of the arguments for singular “they” is that it’s long been a part of the language. Which is true, but misleading. “They” is used when the sex of the referent is unknown (“Someone left their hat on the porch”), irrelevant (“Someone called but they didn’t want to leave a message”), or variable (“Each kid brought their own cookie”). Using singular “they” when the sex of the referent is known (or knowable) is an extension, one that need not be made.
Another argument is that we have no problem using the (originally plural) “you” as a singular pronoun, but of course the loss of “thou” has caused all sorts of awkwardness in our language as we try to distinguish between singular and plural “you”.
Distinguishing sex in pronouns isn’t essential to communication, of course–most languages get by perfectly well without–but it is currently an inherent part of English, something we learn very early in our language development, and trying to force adults to fit their deep-seated language patterns to your vision is, to put it nicely, tilting at windmills.
@ Maroon – English suffers from the loss of thou/you and quite a lot of English speakers substitute with yiz, y’all, youse etc. Of course it has also lost the difference between the formal and informal “you” – which in French meant that you address children/friends etc as “tu” and others as “vous”. Other languages do that as well, which is hell for translators.
There’s a lot of subtle (to us) play with “thou” versus “you” in Shakespeare, which we tend not to pick up on unless we’re reading very closely (at least I didn’t until I was). My favorite kind is when an angry woman confronts a man who is abusing a woman, and she thous him. It’s all the better when he’s a king.
KBPlayer, then there is my favorite from my years in Texas: all y’all.
In some areas, y’all can also be singular, so it can be confusing, too. A guest from Michigan to southeastern Oklahoma was the only one in the lobby of the hotel, and the desk clerk referred to her as y’all. She kept looking around for others, but she was the only one there.
@KB Player,
Yeah, I was thinking about a future state of the language where people are compelled to use words like “theys”, “they all”, “them guys”, etc.
@Ophelia,
Which king was that? I’ve been rereading Shakespeare and that’s one thing I’ve been trying to pay attention to, but my attention doesn’t always want to cooperate.
It is unfortunate that ‘it’ has long implied something less than a person. Otherwise ‘it’ would be the best pronoun to use whenever one is referring to a single person of unknown or ambiguous sex.
If I am ever in a situation where I am asked to specify my preferred pronoun I am tempted to say ‘it’.
I find that my own use of language is changing in response to this pandering panoply of personally preferred pronouns. I find that I’m injecting, “Oh for Fuck’s sake”, into more and more of my speech.
What a Maroon @ 5 – Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, addressing Leontes.
What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling?
In leads or oils? what old or newer torture
Must I receive, whose every word deserves
To taste of thy most worst? Thy tyranny
Together working with thy jealousies,
Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle
For girls of nine, O, think what they have done
And then run mad indeed, stark mad! for all
Thy by-gone fooleries were but spices of it.
That thou betray’dst Polixenes,’twas nothing;
That did but show thee, of a fool, inconstant
And damnable ingrateful: nor was’t much,
Thou wouldst have poison’d good Camillo’s honour,
To have him kill a king: poor trespasses,
More monstrous standing by: whereof I reckon
The casting forth to crows thy baby-daughter
To be or none or little; though a devil
Would have shed water out of fire ere done’t:
Nor is’t directly laid to thee, the death
Of the young prince, whose honourable thoughts,
Thoughts high for one so tender, cleft the heart
That could conceive a gross and foolish sire
Blemish’d his gracious dam: this is not, no,
Laid to thy answer: but the last,–O lords,
When I have said, cry ‘woe!’ the queen, the queen,
The sweet’st, dear’st creature’s dead,
and vengeance for’t
Not dropp’d down yet.
Ah, thanks, haven’t got there yet.
@Jim Baerg,
There are contexts where it’s perfectly normal to refer to people with “it”, such as when a doctor
assigns a gender toobserves the sex of a newborn (“It’s a girl!”), or when someone knocks at a door and you ask “Who is it?” (“It’s Mary.”)So, I was curious about this claim, and so did some Googling of The Critic. While it absolutely is ‘conservative’, and thus often expresses views contrary to my own, I’d definitely not refer to it as “Right-wing”, an epithet I’d be more likely to hurl at FOX, or Breitbart, or even the editorial page of the WSJ. There’s an actual thoughtfulness in a lot of the articles (and a strong repudiation of Trumpism), even if they still are, IMNSHO, still wrong about a lot of things. (Hell, I even suspect that most of their contributors are ‘wrong’ about trans issues, not in their conclusion but their premises–most of them, barring Bindel, still seem to adhere to the concepts of masculinity and femininity as ideals to be maintained.)
I never heard the term “luxury pronouns” before. I don’t know if you invented it, but I love it.
As far as I know I did invent it. I’m particularly irritated by the silly idea we get to stipulate special pronouns for ourselves.
I’ve seen “luxury pronouns” elsewhere, but I think it might have been Arty who said it and he might have got it here…