This month’s issue of Commentary dissects various facets of the new, militant religion of wokeness, which is currently advancing at a pace that the ghost of Mohammed must envy. Among the essays is “Wokeness and the English Language”, whose subtitle encapsulates its thesis: “English is always evolving. But now it evolves not to clarify but to brainwash.” One fo the author’s topics is the fad for “declaring one’s pronouns”, which strikes me as both silly and sinister.
On the silly side is the fact that the preferred pronouns are invariably third person: he/him/his, she/her/her, they/them/their, tey/tem/ter (the original gender-free pronoun, coined in 1986 but too far ahead of its time to catch on). The ostensible purpose of the declaration is to let the cosmos know how the declarant wishes to be addressed. But how often does anyone address someone else in the third person? Does the anxious suitor hold his beloved’s hand, gaze into her eyes and ask, “Will they be my wife?” (That will come a few years from now, when polygamy supersedes sex changing as the cause du jour.)
Why don’t the pronoun-obsessed disclose their preferences among second person pronouns, the ones that are employed face to face? Quakers could put “thee/thee/thy” in their e-mail signature lines. The rest of us would undoubtedly settle for “you/you/your”, but nostalgics for the Age of Shakespeare might correct the Quakers, insisting on “thou, thee, thy”. In time, I’m sure, new second person pronouns would spring up like dandelions in Spring.
The sinister side is the demand that other people adopt one’s own private language. It is now a grave offense to refer to the Public Health Service’s four-star admiral as “he”, even in a communication that she/he/it will never see or hear. “Misgendering” will get you banned from Twitter, whether or not the misgenderee knows that the offending word has been tweeted. Moreover, novel pronouns are being created as fast as viruses mutate, and the woke insist that failing to remember and use them is a grave offense.
While this is one of the pettier species of distributed totalitarianism, it is a step toward, or a symptom of, more serious inroads on liberty. For that reason alone, it deserves mockery and resistance.
Further reading: Paul Mirengoff, “‘They’ Was a Teenage Witch”
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