Pronouns

I'm not a fan of Trump.  But the old saw about a stopped clock being correct twice per day seems to somehow apply to him.  You see, he has made two promises I wish he'd keep.  Knowing him, however, he will keep the promises I wish he should break and break the promises I wish he would keep.  As to the two promises -

He promised to abolish Daylight Savings Time and put the whole country on year-round Standard Time.  He has signed over two hundred Executive Orders.  As far as I can tell, none of them address this issue.  Still, his second term is still in its infancy.  So, there's still hope.

The case for Spring Ahead - Fall Back has done nothing but weaken since the concept was introduced during World War I.  Various purported advantages have been advanced during the century that has elapsed since.  But every time a "benefit" has been reexamined, the expected amount of benefit declines.  Modern studies put the net benefit at near zero.  And until very recently, the harm caused by disrupting everyone's circadian rhythms twice a year hasn't even been factored in.

There has been a general decline in public support for switching back and forth between Standard Time and Daylight Savings Time.  In fact, it has become quite unpopular.  Most people now prefer year-round Standard Time.  The least popular option is continuing as we are, while year-round Daylight Time lands somewhere in between.

Various bills on this subject have been introduced at both the State and the Federal level.  The public has generally supported proposals at the State level that would change the state to year-round Daylight Time.  Voter attitude is "anything is better than the current system".

But the reasons campaigns were successful at getting the public to go along was because they omitted a critical piece of information.  States can revert to year-round Standard Time on their own.  But going to year-round Daylight Time requires a change to Federal law.

Trump promised to take the entire country back to year-round Standard Time.  That would be even better than a state-by-state approach.  The other promise he made that I favor is to get rid of the Debt Ceiling.  Since I devoted an entire post to the subject (see "Sigma 5: Debt Ceiling - Here we go again") a couple of years ago, I am going to say no more here.  We will need to raise it yet a gain soon, so it will be interesting to see how things play out this time around.

And that brings me to the subject of this post.  The Trump Administration has gone after pronouns.  Not all pronouns, just the pronouns associated with DEI.  This is part of a broader effort designed to persecute various groups of people.  I am adamantly opposed to that.  But on the specific issue of those particular pronouns, I think he's half right.

A large number of his followers claim to be Libertarians.  Libertarianism is built around the concept of individual liberty.  It argues for letting people do whatever they want, so long as what they are doing doesn't affect anyone other than themselves.  A person deciding that they prefer a certain set of personal pronouns is something a Libertarian should whole heartily support.

But like much else, application of Libertarian doctrine by the "Libertarian" wing of the GOP is selective.  If a particular behavior is one they approve of then they are all for having the government permit it because Libertarianism.  But if the behavior is one they don't like they stop being Libertarians and do the opposite.  They support government efforts to drive it out of existence.

This is one of a million examples of the GOP in general and Trump in particular selectively ignoring what they claim to be bedrock principles when it suits them.  They are fiscally conservative when it suits them, which turns out to be whenever Democrats are in control.  They completely ignore fiscal conservatism when it would cramp their style, namely when they are in power.  The same applies to law and order and many other stands they take and abandon with metronomic regularity.

And, as I noted, the whole pronouns business is part of a broader effort to harm these people.  But this post is not about that broader effort, important though it might be.  This post is going to narrowly focus on pronouns.  And, more specifically, it is going to focus on the whole they/them business.  And it's not like I am opposed to tinkering with the list of pronouns now in widespread use.

I don't know who invented the word Mizz.  I think it was invented in more than one place and at more than one time.  What I do know is how it made its way into popular culture.  A long time ago a man by the name of Jack Web came up with an idea for a show.  This is so long ago that his show, Dragnet, premiered on the radio before moving to black and white TV.

Dragnet was a radical departure.  It drained the drama out of drama.  Dragnet had no car chases, no shootouts, no scantily clad dames up to no good.  It was "just the facts mam".  I think it worked because it was unique in its approach.

It was very popular in its day and that usually leads to successful imitations.    But nobody has been able to duplicate Web's formula successfully.  Even a "remake" in the form of a 1987 movie, also called Dragnet, was able to parody the formula but not duplicate it.

One aspect of Web's Dragnet that has been duplicated successfully many times since is to claim the events depicted are based on actual events as documented in the files of whichever law enforcement agency is featured.  Each episode of Dragnet claimed to be based on an actual Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) case with "only the names have been changed to protect the innocent".

However true that statement was or was not, Web did incorporate a lot of actual LAPD procedures into his show.  One element he lifted was to address many female witnesses as Mizz.  It is often unclear whether a woman a cop encounters in the course of an investigation is married.  And her marital status often had no bearing on the case that was being investigated.

In this context, adopting a gender neutral approach made sense.  Mizz is a blurring of the pronunciations of Miss and Misses.  In a police context, it avoids embarrassing a potential witness by incorrectly guessing what her marital status is.  I am confident that Web's widespread use of Mizz in his show came straight from the LAPD's Standards and Practices manual.

The show was very popular.  It ran for many years.  So, thanks to Dragnet, a large swath of the general public was familiar with the term.  So, when the woman's movement decided it was time to inject a marital status neutral pronoun into the culture, there it was, waiting to be used.  They decided that Mizz could be shortened to Ms, but that was the only change they had to make.

And when they started rolling it out I was fine with it.  I could see their argument that a woman's marital status was irrelevant or unimportant in a lot of contexts.  On the other hand, Mister (abbreviated to Mr) does not tell us anything about a man's marital status.  So the introduction of Ms evened the playing field while not imposing much of a burden on anyone.

Adding Ms to the mix of pronouns in general use was easy to do.  It was easy to figure out when it was the appropriate choice, and when it wasn't.  It was a new word but its meaning was obvious.  Understanding its meaning was easy.  No context was necessary.  Some people didn't like it.  But their complaints were primarily political rather than being practical.  They didn't like the people who were advocating for it.  Nevertheless, they had no trouble using it or understanding other people when they chose to use it.  

The way we communicate has evolved over the decades since Ms was introduced.  Texting and other contemporary forms of communication  have had the side effect of lessening the need for Ms.  As a result, it's usage probably peaked decades ago.  But when the need arises, it is still around.

And this "marital status neutral" argument is one that various groups wanted to draw a parallel to when they began advocating for a set of gender neutral pronouns.  Again, I see their point.  There are a lot of contexts where the sex of the person is unknown, irrelevant, or unimportant.  So, they argue, let's come up with gender neutral pronouns and encourage their use.  Fine.  The parallel works for me.

What I object to is not the need for gender neutral pronouns but the implementation that has come into general use.  There is already a sex neutral pronoun available, "it".  They argue against using "it" based on the principle that "it" is degrading.  It reduces a person to a thing.  Interestingly enough, French and several other romance languages go the other way.  They apply a sex to inanimate objects.  Yet inanimate objects are inherently sexless.

And they do this very broadly.  These languages put a masculine or a feminine ending on most nouns.  But the choice of whether to use a masculine ending or a feminine ending for a particular noun is somewhat arbitrary.  As far as I can tell, there is little rhyme or reason for which sex is chosen.  And this should be the source of considerable confusion.  But it is not.  Somehow, people soldier along as if there is nothing to see here.

But I get the objection to going to the other extreme and choosing "it".  Fine.  The obvious solution is to come up with a new word or words.  That's what happened with Ms.  And I have already argued that the addition of Ms was a good thing.  Fortunately, a source for potential words to choose from already exists.  Science fiction authors have been wrestling with this problem for decades.

They routinely invent alien races with no sexes, different sexes, multiple sexes, you name it.  Hell.  They have even invented alien races whose sex changes as a member goes through different stages in its life.  As a result, science fiction authors have come up with lots of different words that could be pulled out of their stories and added to the standard list of pronouns to give us gender neutral alternatives to he/she.

But that's not what happened.  Instead, "they" (presumably singular) and "them" (presumably plural) evolved as the consensus choice.  The problem is that these are not new words.  And they are words that are often used in different but similar contexts to he/she.  I find the situation very confusing.  "They" and "them" are plural.  As traditionally used, they refer to multiple people, not a single individual.

I'll be reading along and will come across a sentence that includes the word "they".  But the sentence will make no sense if "they" is being used in the traditional way.  When I see "they" I automatically think "multiple people", but what I have already read leads me to believe that only a single person is involved.

This confusion forces me to stop and carefully examine the context.  Did I miss something?  Did I read something wrong?  If I didn't screw up, and if the context indicates singular, then I eventually conclude that what I am contending with is this new usage of "they".  That's a lot of work that I shouldn't have to do.

I have never been put through a similar experience when I come across an example of Ms in some piece of writing.  No close reading of the text or complicated mental gymnastics are required to figure out that the person being referred to is a woman but that her marital status doesn't figure into what the writer is trying to say.  But I can't tell you how many times in recent years that I have been tripped up by someone using they/them in this new way.

This they/them business is a completely unforced error.  Fortunately, it is also one that can easily be repaired.  The appropriate people (whoever came up with this they/them business in the first place) need to survey Science Fiction, then pick out whatever words appeal to them and go with them instead of they/them.

If they don't like any of the options they find there, then in principle I have no objection to them coming up with new words.  But really, with the broad selection of options Science Fiction has already come up with, it says something about the people doing the picking that they object to all of them.

What supporters of the LGBTQ (and some other letters - remember when it was just gay/straight) communities have come up with so far is just not working.  They need to understand that they are a minority who seems dead set on imposing an unnecessarily large burden on the majority while gaining little for themselves.  Ms imposed a small burden on the majority.  That made it a reasonable accommodation.

The whole they/them business is an unreasonable accommodation for several reasons.  But an important one is that there are alternatives that impose a far smaller burden on the majority.  The question is, are they smart enough to figure this out?  So far, the answer is no.  By being unreasonable in their "ask" they have handed an issue to Trump and his people.  And that is an additional cost attached to what they are asking for.

Objections to this whole they/them business should have been raised a long time ago.  And if the objections had been raised by people like me who are sympathetic to these groups of people because we are aware of the rampant discrimination they are subjected to, then perhaps the objections would have been acted upon.  One reason I didn't speak out before was because I had no idea who to speak to.  Unfortunately, we have now reached the stage where desperate measures are required.

Finally, I mentioned previously that I have no problem making changes to our standard set of pronouns.  What I object to is ham-handed changes like they/them.  As further proof of my willingness to change things up let me point to the whole "you" problem.  Is "you" singular or plural?  It's both, and that's confusing.

We should have two words, one for singular and one for plural.  That would eliminate the confusion surrounding situations where it takes an excessive amount of mental effort to figure out whether "you" refers to a single person or a group of people.

This is an issue that has long annoyed me.  But I had long since given up on being able to do anything about it.  Well, there is no time like the present.  Fortunately, I have what I think is a good solution for this problem.  "You" would be restricted to the singular.  We would use a different word for a group of people.  And, it turns out we can go down a road similar to the Mizz/Ms road to find that word.

The word that plays the role of Mizz in my propoased solution is "youall".  Mizz is not officially a word, so it has no established spelling.  Youall is also not an official word, so I'm not exactly sure how it should be rendered.

Youall is widely used in the South in the same way that Mizz was widely used within the LAPD (and probably many other police departments).  Most people didn't personally use Mizz, but thanks to Jack Web and Dragnet, they were familiar with it.  Only a small fraction of the U.S. population uses youall, but pretty much everybody in the country is familiar with it.

Mizz is a blurring of Mister and Misses.  Youall is an informal contraction of "you" and "all".  So, like Mizz it becomes virtually self defining.  As a result, no great work needs to be done to introduce the word into general usage.  Once introduced, people will find it easy to use it themselves.  They will also have no problem understanding it when someone else uses it.

And, of course, there is a contraction of youall that is also in widespread use in the South, "y'all".  In the same way that Mizz was shortened to Ms, I propose using the contraction but dropping the apostrophe.  "Yall" would be introduced as the plural of "you".  So, "you" would refer to one  person and "yall" would refer to a group.

What if it was unclear as to whether one person or multiple people were involved.  I am okay with groups of one.  So, if the number of people is unknown or unclear, then "yall" should be used.  People would need to learn that "yall" can occasionally mean only one person.

Yall follows in the footsteps of Ms.  It is easy to adopt.  It reduces confusion rather than increasing it.  I don't think what I am suggesting precisely follows the current usage of youall/y'all, but I think the people who currently use youall/y'all won't have much trouble adapting to the change.  And they can take pride in the fact that one of their words has moved out of the derogatory category and into the accepted category.

So, there you have it.  More on pronouns than you ever wanted to experience.  But also a path that gets us to a better place.