[Ads-l] The New Yorker Comma Queen on "they", part II

Ben Zimmer bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM
Sun Apr 3 21:32:13 UTC 2016


On Sun, Apr 3, 2016 at 8:35 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> Obviously a pronoun whose time has come, or already come and gone.  In
> today's Times:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/whos-they.html
>
> Seems more like "Whose they?" than "Who's they?", since Hess argues here
> that adopting "they" as a gender-fluid pronoun is too easy:
>
> “they” feels a little bit like a shortcut on the way to acceptance. It
> represents a third option outside the binary, sure. But it doesn’t compel
> people to make mental room for a new word"
>
> So it's both too radical and not radical enough.
>

As was pointed out on Twitter, "LITERALLY A PRONOUN IS A SHORTCUT."

https://twitter.com/kevinpokeeffe/status/714828887482564610

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