Personal Pronoun Is an Oxymoron

I thought I'd open with that old gem to illustrate how I'd like to begin this post.

There is a lot of fighting about pronouns these days with people wanting to select their personal pronouns. The problem with this is the function in common language that pronouns serve.

pronoun

any of a small set of words (such as I, she, he, you, it, we, or they) in a language that are used as substitutes for nouns or noun phrases and whose referents are named or understood in the context

What a pronoun does is replace a person's personal noun (well, any specific noun) in order to replace it with a small, general word that will serve as a shorthand for it in further language. For this reason, pronouns are a limited set of short words, and we need an antecedent in order to understand what noun they are replacing. Not providing an antecedent is referred to in some quarters as playing the pronoun game (i.e. making your reader or audience guess).

Pronouns need antecedents. That means that the thing (or person, or place) that the pronoun refers to needs to have been mentioned already by name somewhere earlier in the sentence or paragraph. If it’s not clear which thing the pronoun refers to, the reader can get quite confused.

So the reason why our grammar works as well as it does is because there aren't many pronouns and they work in a system, reliably. It's clear and obvious which pronouns to use with which antecedents, and no one gets confused.

To demand personal pronouns starts to break that system. It no longer is clear which pronouns go with which antecedents in speaking or writing. Confusion crops up.

To want something to be personal, you want it to be special and unique ... only for you. Pronouns are the very opposite of this. They exist to simplify language and make it less clunky and awkward, not to complicate it. To demand a pronoun that is personal and unique to you is to attempt inject awkwardness and clunkiness back into that system. You already have a noun that is special and unique to you: your name.

a reply to: ketsuko

Well thats just great Kets.

Not only is math racist, so is grammar!

Grammar nazis confirmed. Send in the troops!

a reply to: ketsuko

How did you guess that my personal pronoun, actually is Oxymoron ?????

a reply to: Nothin

Im abit of a panmoron myself.

a reply to: ketsuko

" I " Agree .

The idea is to rebrand "awkward and clunky" as "misunderstood and vulnerable" because it's less creepy, and a lot of vehemently progressive folks are mad because it's simply not working.

originally posted by: TzarChasm
The idea is to rebrand "awkward and clunky" as "misunderstood and vulnerable" because it's less creepy, and a lot of vehemently progressive folks are mad because it's simply not working.

Pee Wee Herman said it best, “I know you are but what am I”

😬

I can't think of a bigger conspiracy. Quality content here.

People just want to feel special because they can't get all their online validation from real people anymore. I swear some folks today just need attention from every source imaginable.

a reply to: LordAhriman

Not a conspiracy. Most people are ignorant of grammar and don't even know all the basic parts of speech, let alone the functions they serve in speech and writing.

a reply to: ketsuko

There is a lot of fighting about pronouns these days with people wanting to select their personal pronouns. The problem with this is the function in common language that pronouns serve.

Not sure that's a proper understanding of the concept of pronouns as he/she/they/it/etc intend. True, pronouns aren't personal in and of themselves (they're essentially abstract), but the "what is/are your pronoun(s)" is an attempt to make it apersonal. It's almost a self-identity that transcends Self.

It's weird af to be sure, and I don't get it (especially those who choose "they"), but it is what it is.

Maybe the labeling is wrong calling them "personal" pronouns, since the intended effect is that they're apersonal.

That's the point.

Sir Hard Harry has dealt with it with folks. Sir Hard Harry is a me/it. *shrug*

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: LordAhriman

Most people are ignorant of grammar and don't even know all the basic parts of speech, let alone the functions they serve in speech and writing.

True. But trying to understand the whole "personal pronoun" thing strictly from a grammar—or even definition-based—point of view is doomed to fail, at least on a personal level.

It's not defined by linguistics. It's a more integral approach. Maybe that's why people have trouble, or a problem, with it.

Sir Hard Harry is only speculating.

7 Things You Didn't Know About The History Of Pronouns And Gender

Sorry, Conservatives: Gender-Neutral Pronouns Are 800 Years Old

Many have argued that the introduction of a singular nonbinary pronoun they is the invention of millennial special snowflakes. I have bad news for those people. The singular gender-nonspecific they has been around since the 13th century, and it was only as recently as the 1850s that it began, at the bidding of academics, to disappear.

www.theodysseyonline.com...

a reply to: SirHardHarry

Pronouns are by nature not personal. They are shorthand placeholders to refer to the noun. When people want to self-dentify, the noun is where they do it. And if they want to continue to be referred to that way, then they should specify no pronouns, not pick any of the existing ones or make one up.

Another possible way to illustrate how bad this idea is would be to take a large group of random people who believe they need their own pronouns, mix them into random groups of four to six, have them all draw random pronouns out of a hat, and then have them all converse using their new pronouns in the convo.

Let them take their pronouns with them when you remix the groups and have the new groups also converse.

Then bring them back to their original groupings and have them recall what everyone's pronouns were and converse accordingly.

I expect the results would be atrocious, sort of like expecting everyone to be able to flawlessly recall everyone's name, but that's what they are demanding of everyone with this pronoun game. Only instead of just new levels of frustration in conversation, they want legal penalty if you don't automatically know at the outset and fail to get it right.

originally posted by: LordAhriman
I can't think of a bigger conspiracy. Quality content here.

A stable language with set definitions of words is paramount to a stable society.

We have laws and constitutions that were written where the specific meaning of words define their intent.

Subtle changes to language can skew th prior intent and meaning of all legal documents.

This is not trivial.

a reply to: ketsuko

What it does is make me refer to everybody as 'they' so it's actually less 'special' because less specific.

But I'm special so if you want to use a pronoun for me it's: her grand cosmic highness.

originally posted by: JinMI
a reply to: Nothin

Im abit of a panmoron myself.

Ah yes, my friend !

Those were the days !!

originally posted by: NorthOfStuff

originally posted by: LordAhriman
I can't think of a bigger conspiracy. Quality content here.

A stable language with set definitions of words is paramount to a stable society.

We have laws and constitutions that were written where the specific meaning of words define their intent.

Subtle changes to language can skew th prior intent and meaning of all legal documents.

This is not trivial.

First rule of Linguistics: All language changes over time. Or it dies.

Language cannot therefore, be codified by laws and "constitutions"; those things may be constructed from language, but they cannot prevent language from being re-constructed to fit the social needs of the population.

Thus we do not speak Latin in our daily course of communication. Nor is Old English or High German the current Lingua Franca.

a reply to: ketsuko


I've decided to buy a one-way ticket to Mexico and cross over into the New United States of America.


My pronouns are MAGA! /KAG!

You have to shout it otherwise I can get you fired.

a reply to: Mantiss2021

Language as in the words, but the underlying grammatical structures are fairly constant. That's how you get dialects of English that have almost no recognizable English words, but a structure consistent with English making them English dialects.

A pronoun serves a distinct grammatical purpose in the structure.

Understand I am not talking about gendered v. ungendered. I am talking three people who look to be the same gender and would technically be referred to with the same pronoun, but one wants she, one wants they, and one wants xer. There is no structure to that, and it blows up the purpose and structure of the pronoun in grammar.