Until lately, I have only chuckled at the idea of “preferred pronouns.” They seemed to me to be not much more than irritating. But this morning, I ran into a video which made me realize the horrible effects that they can and will have on our language. (And, I presume, any language which is spoken by people who insist on capitulating to this nonsense. This video -- which appears to be a series of presentations from a channel — seemed to me to have promise, and the very first segment was great! But the second one was frustrating to the point that we could not figure out what the woman was talking about. Was it a couple? Was it a gang of people? Was it someone who had a dog with her? Was it a pregnant woman? Nope. It seems that it was one person. Think about the repercussions! While you might find the whole thing interesting — as we did — the segment I’m talking about starts at 10:46
Every time I hear someone use "they" instead of "he" or "she", I hear Mrs. Jay, my 8th-grade English teacher spinning in her grave. She's 1000 miles away and I can hear it. It sounds like a jet turbine engine. I heard they hooked her up to a generator and she's powering half of Indianapolis.
What's going to happen when they start inserting this nonsense into every book that's published, and Amazon goes back to fix the text on books that were written before the world went crazy? In the video that Michelle posted above, as she said, the first segment was fine, but the presenter in the second segment used "they" and "them" pronouns to refer to an individual, and it was just too much work to try to figure out what they/them was talking about.
A couple of years ago, I noticed a typo on the website of a local college. Emailed the webmaster, who corrected it and replied ... and added he/him next to his signature. Huh. Just in case, I guess, he didn't know I'd know I was conversing with a human.
I don't sweat the small stuff. The world is coming apart and I'm going to worry about proper grammar.
I'm not sure I understand this. When you are talking to someone you say, 'you', which is non-gender. When you refer to someone, you could use their name instead of he/her. We can easily put a stop to all this nonsense by simply refusing to embrace it.
You might not have listened to the second part, which was mostly unintelligible due to its use of such.
I made every effort to make sense of that video. Some of it began to resonate with me, but was quickly lost in the shuffle. Reminded me of so much psychobabble.
As I recall in English class- they and them, were more than one person . I kinda like what my dad used to describe Those -- male - He/She - female She/He . Really see no disrespect in the terminology.
Some people get offended too easily. We have our own type of language down here in the south. Quite easy once you get past the accent on slow and to the point.
I agree. I wonder if they've been brought up to believe they must and can live in a world where they're never offended by anyone about anything. At least, I've read that elsewhere. What a life.