A pregnant pause in the word wars

by David Benjamin

 

“‘You’re not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more,’ said Yo-less. ‘It’s speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons.’”

—Terry Pratchett 

 

MADISON, Wis.—Ever since I heard, in grade school, the passage in Matthew 25—“Truly, I say to you, as you did to one of the least of my brethren, you did to me”—I’ve been a liberal. But I have my limits. 

For example, for some reason, the use of the the term, “pregant person,” clearly a substitute for (excuse my language) “pregnant woman,” tends to jar on my ear. Really, unless I missed an important week in Mr. Sherman’s freshman biology class, I’ve always been convinced that only the female of a species (not including primitive hermaphrodites, e.g., nightcrawlers), can be pregnant. This revision suggests that associating pregnancy with women is pejorative and demeaning. Somehow, unbidden by lexicographers, “pregnant woman” has morphed into a slur that must be cleansed from the commentary of every host on MSNBC and every op-ed celebrity in the Times.

Still, one woman’s slur can be another dame’s purr. I think of the late, great Koko Taylor belting out her version of “I’m a [pardon her language] Woman.” It goes, in part, as follows: “I’m goin’ down yonder, behind the sun/ Gonna do somethin’ to ya, ain’t never been done/ Gonna hold back the lightnin’ with the palm of my hand/ Shake hands with Devil, make him crawl on the sand/ I’m a woman, yeah, I’m a woman/ I’m a ball of fire…”

A song of similar title—and attitude—written by Leiber & Stoller and introduced to the pop charts by Miss Peggy Lee, required a spelling exercise which, if updated for the politically enlightened, would be a little ungainly. Were Miss Lee still with us (Oh, would that ’twere!), her scansion wouldn’t survive the translation. Instead of the economical and brazen, “I’m a woman, W-O-M-A-N!,” Peggy would be singing, “I’m a womb-bearing person, W-O-M-B-hyphen-B-E-A-R-I-N-G-space-P-E-R-S-O-N.” 

Ew!

Also hot lately in the ultra-liberal euphemism community is the right to conceal one’s gender through pronoun sanitation. It has somehow become a form of cisgender oppression to refer to an apparent male using the words “he” and “him,” or to a seeming female as “she” and “her.” 

When I was in tenth grade, I lovingly memorized a poem by Lord Byron, which in this era of third-person-plural neutrality would read, “They walk in beauty, like the night/ Of cloudless climes and starry skies;/ And all that’s best of dark and bright/ Meet in their aspect and their eyes…”

Ya gotta ask, who are these people? How many are there? Who’s in charge and what has he done to Byron’s brain?

Oops, you see? I slipped in a “he” there, evidence that I have yet to get my mind right. 

And then there’s William Cullen Bryant’s classic poem, Thanatopsis, where hims, hers, hes and shes mingle in sexist anachrony. Correcting Bryant for 21st-century consumption, the first lines would read, “To them who in the love of nature holds/ Communion with their visible forms, they speaks/ A various language; for their more LGBTQ+ hours/ They has a voice of gladness, and a smile/ And eloquence of beauty; and they glides/ Into their darker musings … ”

I know. This passage suffers a number disagreement. This is because I have no idea whether a gender-neutral plural pronoun requires agreement with a plural verb, or if this dissonance is a Newspeak mandate. Where is a Generation Z grammarian when you need one?

Considering this conflation of “he/she” with “they” apolitically, I get stuck in the mathematical gospel that “one” and “more than one” are not the same. In language, this means that a singular and plural are different and, without a clear antecedent or colloquial dispensation, irreconcilable. Language since time immemorial has contained tools to make clear whether there’s one of me or more of us. Eliminating the guideposts in language sows a paralytic ambiguity and poses the prospect that all literature, from Gilgamesh and Homer to the lyrics of Taylor Swift, must be subjected to a vast linguistic project of tube-tying and vasectomy.

I guess we can be grateful that ovaries and testes come in pairs. They are both “they.”

I also have yet to determine whether “I” and “you” are covered in the new pronoun protocol. But, considering the sheer narcissism of the movement, I suspect the first-person singular has survived the excommunication of he, him, she and her.

On the other hand, methinks I doth protest too much. This whole alternate pronoun gag bears the scent of a fad, a squall of undergraduate rebellion that will perish of its own incoherence. I object, rhetorically, because I’ve loved English both for its rules and malleability, ever since Loretta Ducklow, my fourth-grade teacher sentenced me—as penance for misbehavior—to copy out pages of Webster’s Dictionary, a punishment equivalent to tossing B’rer Rabbit into the briar patch. I take as a personal affront even the silliest, most evanescent effort to fetter, muddy or degrade the language that’s been my life’s work.

Even as I chafe, I counsel myself to shut up and wait out this latest skirmish in the word wars. Trends, left to their devices, eventually die on the vine, unwatered by their inconstant gardeners. Before they pass, however, anyone who opposes the revised version is destined to be denounced and despised by the purists of the cause.

Besides, language abuse is hardly exclusive to the left. Try as you will, you’ll never figure out what Ron DeSantis means by “woke,” nor can you elicit comprehensibly the Alabama definition of “unborn child.” For me, at least, it’s easier to humor a girl who calls herself “they” than to tolerate a once and future president who calls convicts “hostages” and who apparently regards his great great grandparents Johannes Christian and Katharina Trump—who migrated to the United States without papers—as “animals … ‘cause that’s what they [he and she] are. Animals.”