On pronouns- N. J. Enfield in TLS:

‘There are two kinds of thing that people tend to want to fix in language. One is logical consistency. If you are a word nerd – or just an old- fashioned obsessive-compulsive – looking for an itch to scratch, look no further than a pronoun paradigm. In Pronoun Trouble, the linguist John McWhorter presents a neat 3 x 2 table of English pronouns with rows for first, second, and third person, and columns for singular and plural. There is a pleasing parallelism between the first- and third-person rows: plural we for singular I mirrors plural they for singular he/she/it. But then there’s you, where the same word appears unchanged in both the singular column and the plural column. Shouldn’t there be a you plural to match we and they? That would be only logical. Symmetry-seekers could suggest a fix or two. We could bring back thou for second-person singular and ye for the plural. Or we could just adopt a perfectly good non-standard solution that already exists: keep you for singular and add youse or y’all for plural.’

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‘The persistent tension between our desires for logical structure, on the one hand, and maintaining social standards, on the other, arises from the following fact. Your every utterance tells people two things: what you say and who you are. And identity trumps logic every time.’

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‘Dutch is a tu/vous language, whose speakers cannot ask “Where are you going?” until they have decided the level of politeness or familiarity to express. To render the English you, Dutch speakers must decide between je “you informal” or u “you formal”. This forced expression of (im)politeness brings an ideology of social hierarchy to the fore every time a second-person pronoun is used. This may seem like an imposition to the egalitarian in Europe, but it is nothing compared to the elaborate attention to social hierarchy seen elsewhere in the world, for example in many languages of Southeast Asia.’

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‘Pronoun Trouble is a lovely example of the author’s readable and mildly eccentric popular linguistic writing. Anyone looking for a political rant chiding the woke for their obsession with the superficialities of language will be largely disappointed (though, if attentive, they will come away with some ammunition). Many readers knowing John McWhorter’s critiques of wokism in other contexts may infer that the book’s title is a veiled reference to Judith Butler’s post-structuralist manifesto Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity (1990). But instead, in a wry rug-pull on the opening page, he tells us that the phrase is from Looney Tunes, a world in which pronoun trouble can get you a shotgun blast in the face. In the episode in question, Bugs Bunny has asked Elmer Fudd (who is dressed for rabbit-hunting season), “Would you like to shoot me now?” Daffy Duck interjects by echoing Bugs’s wording, “shoot me now”, and now “me” is no longer Bugs, but Daffy – and you can guess what happens next. Unfortunately for Daffy, me is usually the person saying the words, a fact about pronouns that no amount of linguistic engineering could fix.’

Read the article here.

Shoot me now, shoot me later? Later appears to be always better.

But you can change the pronoun or the meaning of the pronoun as well.

And yes, identity trumps logic always. Identity is so fragile, that’s why we keep talking about it.