anguage evolves to meet the changing needs of humans, so it shouldn't be
surprising that politics drives language. After the Communists took over
China in 1949, they made drastic changes to the Chinese language.
The characters were made simpler, in accordance with the putative goal of
improving literacy, but many suspected its real purpose was to make it harder
for people to read anything published before the Communists took over.
Needless to say, people in Taiwan and much of the Chinese diaspora considered the changes ugly and rejected them. Until very recently dictionaries in each country pointedly ignored the characters of the other, making the task of reading stuff from the other side clumsier and inconvenient. The choice of character set became a political statement.
The same is now happening in English. We tend to forget how destructive the feminists were, with some notable exceptions, to our language. We were bombarded with terms like mansplaining, patriarchy, and toxic masculinity, intended not to convince but to reinforce group solidarity by enhancing outrage. Feminists also started the fad of using ‘she’ as a gender-indeterminate pronoun. Now they're baffled when others use the same tactic to create terms like ‘pregnant person.’ Once again, language is used to make political statements instead of communicating.
Ironically, feminists and conservatives now find themselves on the same side of many issues, but the language gets in the way. Group pressure creates a tribal language intended to enforce solidarity. That language drives away potential allies. Once it gets started, it's hard to stop.
Exhibit A:
Emma Corrin has revealed that they don't mind if people get their pronouns wrong ‘as long as they try’.
That sentence is from a proofreading-challenged tabloid, but it's no typo. It's not important who or what Emma Corrin is. What's important is that she refers to herself as ‘they’ and therefore any sentence anyone writes about her is unparseable. This is, of course, deliberate: the goal is to create confusion that can only be resolved by adopting the speaker's ideology.
If we refer to Corrin as a ‘they,’ what does it mean when she says “they get their pronouns wrong”? Is she getting her own pronouns wrong, or is someone else? It's impossible to tell.
Try to create a paragraph using this wonderful newspeak and you end up with linguistic mush:
They might be happy about it, whoever they is, but if they try then they don't mind if they get their pronouns wrong. If they did, they would stop calling them they, because they is unhappy with them.
Maybe it's an inevitable development: as humans split into tribes, each tribe creates its own shared language. Every in-group, whether it's political activists or computer geeks, invents terms that have unconventional meanings. These terms have to be abandoned and repudiated if the group finds itself in need of allies. But the group faces a dilemma: cast out the heretics and risk running out of troops, or keep them and lose the group identity and the comforting feeling of conformism it provides.
nov 28 2022, 5:31 am
