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John H. McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University. He is the host of the podcast Lexicon Valley and writes a weekly column for The New York Times. McWhorter is the author of twenty-three books, including Nine Nasty Words, Woke Racism, The Power of Babel, and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and John McWhorter explore how language evolves, why English only has one form of you, and if we should embrace the singular they.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: The last time you were on this podcast, we had a conversation about your excellent book on wokeness/the identity synthesis. This time we're talking about your latest book on pronouns—which is a lot more fun, I have to say, in part because of its subject. Some political stuff comes in. You discuss the most controversial pronoun of this moment, the singular plural of they. But for the most part, it is not about political issues. Why should we care about pronouns? What do pronouns tell us about the English language? Why are they worth thinking about?
John McWhorter: That's a good question. I wrote Pronoun Trouble because Woke Racism was, I thought, a necessary book but it was a very angry book. After I write angry books I always like to do some kind of linguistics book and that's what this was supposed to be. Pronouns are interesting because they are this compact collection of words that all have interesting histories, that tie into historical and political issues. Although, to tell you the truth, when I wrote the book two years ago, I had no idea that we'd be talking about trans issues with the tone that we're talking about them today, such that they/them would be connected to it. I was just writing about it more from the jolly linguist perspective. But yeah, pronouns are hot. They're hot little words.
Mounk: One of the things that I think pervades the book in an interesting way—and it might be worth mentioning before we delve into some of these pronouns—is the general attitude towards language. One of my favorite facts about linguistics, especially in the context of English, is that the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, claims that it is a dictionary of usage, that it's trying to track which words have become established enough that they're going to be around for a while. There's nothing prescriptive about it. But the preface to the French dictionary published by the Académie Française says that after taking into account the advice and opinions of learned bodies like the French College of Physicians about what kind of words they might add, they decide, sovereignly, what is and is not a word in the French language. That's a very different kind of attitude.
You don't have a prescriptivist attitude towards pronouns, you're quite skeptical about a lot of the supposed rules that people have about their right and wrong usage. Tell us about that.
McWhorter: Exactly. Linguists in general are definitely descriptive, and our idea is that language is interesting, complicated and nuanced the way it is. When you decree that the language should be a certain way, the judgments are almost always arbitrary. More to the point, especially when we're talking about speech rather than writing, those prescriptions almost never work. So, the Académie Française is an august institution, but they have next to no real effect whatsoever. That's true of all of the academies, including the one in Germany that's trying to avoid the number of English words that are creating something called Denglisch. This never has any effect. Things are just gonna happen and it's better to be along for the ride. Pronouns, for example, don't do what you would expect them to do. If you are a periwigged person somewhere in London in the late 1700s, you might decide that English should be like Latin—that's nice, but the way English pronouns actually work is every bit as interesting as the way they happen to work in Latin.
Mounk: One example that I think is rooted in a long veneration for Latin is that a lot of people are going to say I'm misspeaking when I say, Me and John are recording a podcast, even though that's a locution that comes naturally to English speakers. What is the case against it? Why does that tick people off? Why do you think they're wrong about that?
McWhorter: Well, that's one of those things where it seems to people that if you say, Billy and me went to the store, you should be able to say, me went to the store. And if you don't, you shouldn't say, Billy and me went to the store. The truth is that that whole idea is one that some people came up with in the 1700s thinking that English should be like Latin, where you would not say, Billy and me, you would say, Billy and I. But in other languages, such as French—and the French don't consider their language sloppy—it would be Guillaume et moi went to the store, and the world keeps spinning, nobody bats an eye.
And so it's a misanalysis of English based on a—now rather antique—veneration of Latin and ancient Greek when we feel self-conscious about saying something like, Yascha and me are doing a podcast. It's perfectly ordinary English just like it's perfectly ordinary French. But you get pretty good at saying, Yascha and I are doing a podcast. It really does become effortless. But this has nothing to do with the way English grammar works. We can't fix that. There is no way people are going to start feeling okay saying, Him and me were in the store when doing a radio show or making a speech. In the book I compare it to the idea that in the summer, you're supposed to wear little tiny ankle length socks instead of tube socks. That doesn't make any sense. It would almost be better to have the tube socks. But that's just the way it is. We should realize that when someone says, Him and me went to the store, it's not because they're ignorant. It's just that we have an artificial rule that we've been taught to observe. So, that's the Yascha and me story.
Mounk: There's potentially a slight element of class critique in that. A lot of the time when there is that kind of prescriptive rule, it is a rule that you're acculturated into as you go through a formal education and learn that it is in fact incorrect to say, Me and John are recording a podcast. You show off your greater erudition by saying John and I. So is that part of the concern here—that you're unlikely to fully change the language, but you might say, those people over there are uncultured; they're not speaking correctly, and that implies there's something wrong with them?
McWhorter: Yeah, there is definitely some of that in it, especially because classism is more tolerated in enlightened culture than racism is—at least in America. Classism gives that aspect of human sentiment a vent. To the point that you can do it without really thinking, it is kind of like learning ballroom dance, or like, in the old days when the cultivated person was expected to at least pretend to play the piano, or until very recently, someone like me was expected to at least pretend to speak French. It was a class marker and that's what this Billy and I ends up being. You pride yourself on having learned the trick and it's a handy way to look down on people who haven't. It gives us a way of being classist now that we can't carry walking sticks and parasols.
Mounk: Obviously there is a racial dimension to this. There is a distinctive dialogue of American English which is spoken among many communities of African Americans. In a similar way, people often say, that's wrong English. And you have, in the context of pronouns, but also in other contexts, often defended that by saying, no, that's just a dialect in the same way that there's regional or other kinds of dialects. And there's nothing inherently better or worse in that way of approaching the language.
McWhorter: It's an argument that I frankly think is often not properly made, because if you say that that’s their way of speaking and it's part of their culture, criticism of it then becomes racist. A person might think, no, it's actually non-racist for me to say you need to speak better. It means I'm being honest and I'm trying to bring you into the greater resources of society. But the truth is, typically, people speak both black English and standard English depending on the context, and they don't think about it consciously. And more to the point, black English is not broken English in any scientific sense. In many ways, it's more complicated than standard English. There are a lot of interesting things about it. So, black English is not illegitimate English any more than Bavarian German is illegitimate High German. They're just variations on a theme. They have different social meanings, but that doesn't mean they're inherently broken.
Mounk: There are a lot of Germans who will disagree with that about Bavarian German—but coming from Munich, I, of course, agree. How do we think about whether there are any elements of language usage that we can oppose? Certainly, I imagine that when you're composing your articles, you're thinking, how can I write more elegantly? What is the right word choice? Where does the distinction lie between being a weird top-down prescriptivist who's going around telling people how to speak, and giving up all the joy we take in expressing ourselves better or worse? To take an example that is not directly from Pronoun Trouble: in some dictionaries, one of the definitions of literally now includes figuratively, because people say literally all the time when what they mean is that it didn't literally happen. Do you think I can oppose that use of literally because it just robs that word of useful meaning when it's said in that kind of unthinking way? Are there some things in the language where you would have a slightly curmudgeonly attitude? Or do you think that if people use literally just for emphasis—like saying very or extremely—we should just roll with it, and nothing's really lost?
McWhorter: What's important is whether or not meaning comes through. That usage of literally to mean its opposite is frustrating for many people—but it's not that anybody doesn't understand what someone means when they say, I was literally dying of thirst when they're standing in front of you and obviously did not die. It is like the word fast. You can say, a rabbit runs fast, and say, the chair was screwed fast to the floor. Those are two different meanings of fast that would never confuse anybody. You can seed a watermelon, meaning, you're taking the seeds out. You can seed the ground, meaning, you're putting the seeds in. There are about 75 of those pairs in English. Literally is just one of them.
So, there are little areas of the English language that don't always make logical sense, but they don't confuse people because language is all about context. Some language rules are arbitrary. For example, you could say, you can't just walk into the room and start yelling. That's an ordinary English sentence. To me, the use of the word just in that sentence is wrong. What you're saying is, you can't simply walk into the room. If you say you just can't, what you're saying is, you absolutely can't for some moral reason. That wrinkle bothers me. I have noticed people saying you just can't in old movies, so it's not new, but it's always struck me as illogical. However, no one has ever been confused by it. I would never say that everybody should stop saying this. Because one, they wouldn't. And two, there's no reason to tell them to stop, since the meaning is always clear.
Mounk: Let me hazard a mild pushback here. You can explain to me why I'm wrong about this. A lot of the time, it's just a question of aesthetic preference. When you have a new usage for a word, you realize that it still exists in its true context. You can express your pleasure about something by saying, it's cool, it's great, it's amazing, or it's rad, which comes from radical. I realize that when I say, Jean-Marie Le Pen was a radical politician, that means something different from when my friend who is a ski bum says, that was rad. There's no meaning lost there.
It feels to me a little bit different in some of the contexts where we use literally, because when you're saying, I'm literally starving to death, I agree with you, that doesn't bother me because it's really obvious in that context that you're not actually starving to death. But what if I say, he literally shouted at me, where it's really useful to have literally as a marker of saying that something actually happened. But some people nowadays are very tempted to just throw it in as a way of saying, he was just very rude. It's a way of reinforcing the strength of a sentence. Here, there might be confusion and we might be losing our ability to denote that something literally happened, which would be a kind of loss. It wouldn't be a horrible thing. The world wouldn't fall apart, but it would be a loss in our ability to express something important about the world in a concise and elegant way.
McWhorter: I see where you're going. I would really have to say I've never encountered a case of literally where I felt that it was ambiguous. If somebody said he was literally shouting at me, I can't imagine them meaning, he was just a little loud. They would mean the person actually raised their voice—but all languages have little dings in them where there really is no quick way to express something that you could express in most other languages. My favorite example is in French, where you can't say that something sticks out. For example, if you have a rental car and you park it in the lot, all the cars are parked in a straight line and you don't park yours all the way in, so the back is kind of sticking out—you can say you parked wrong, there are all sorts of things you can say, but you couldn't go to the office and say, mine is the car that's sticking out back there. There's no verb for that. Or, in Danish, there's not a word that you would specifically use to mean to get liquid off of something. You can't wipe, you can only erase. Everybody does fine, but all languages have those sorts of dings. With literally, and the idea that it actually creates ambiguity—I'd have to listen around for that, because maybe you're right. I know what you mean about the potential, but I personally haven't seen it happen.
Mounk: But would it be better to have a language where you figure out a way around those things? Again, it's not like Denmark or France are falling apart because of this. To use an English example, the word biweekly really annoys me. It's not that anybody uses it wrongly. But do people mean twice a week or do they mean once every two weeks? It's really annoying that we've run these two very different concepts into the same word in English. I don’t think this is practical, but if, somehow, we could have a language commission that clarifies this and says, bi-weekly means twice a week, do not ever use the word bi-weekly to mean every two weeks, and we finalize that together, that would solve some problems in the English language.
McWhorter: I'm going to concede that bi-weekly and bi-annual are unfortunate because it really can create mistakes. I've had lawyers tell me that that's true. They say that they don't like that and wish it could change. I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect that context takes care of that one 99% of the time.
Mounk: I'll take that as a great victory. Let's go to the basics of pronouns. What do pronouns accomplish grammatically in a language? What elements of pronouns are the same in every language? What are the choices that English has made over time about how pronouns work that might mark it out from some other languages?
McWhorter: Pronouns stand in for nouns. There's no human language where you would say, I bought a chair, I put the chair in the living room and I sat in the chair, and every time I look at the chair I think about the time I bought the chair. After you first mention the chair, you refer to that chair as it. After you first mention Henrietta, you refer to her as she, and so on. There is no language in the world where that isn't true. So, no matter what language you're studying or have discovered, one of the first things you'll learn is how it handles stand-ins for nouns. How languages differ is in how finely they cut the salami—how many different pronouns you have for how many different shades of concept. English is unique in that as languages go, it is pretty pronoun-light. Only he and she are distinguished by gender, but not any of the others. That's a little weak as pronouns go. It happens in Western Europe to an extent. But English really takes it a long way. We don't have enough. That's been the grand theme of the development of English pronouns. In German, you have the single you, du, and then for plural you’ve got ihr and then the polite form, Sie. In English we just have you. That's a very compact set of pronouns that's really overworking poor little you. English has just been that way for many hundreds of years.
Mounk: I'm trying to think of a language that has fewer pronouns. Perhaps Chinese might be one of those?
McWhorter: It depends on how you count it. They have two yous. Nǐ for single and then nǐmen. But they have tā for he, she, and it. Mandarin and English have similar histories in that lots of people have used them as second languages. When that happens, languages tend to wear down somewhat. Mandarin is like that—but once you get into the other Chinese languages, they have more normal amounts of pronouns.
Mounk: That's a really interesting observation because it obviously came to my mind that Chinese—because of the masculine, feminine and neutral forms all being contained in tā—has relatively few pronouns. English, as you were pointing out, has relatively few pronouns. It came to my mind that they are very old languages. But you are saying that it's less about the age of a language than about whether it had to serve as a local lingua franca, which puts pressure toward simplification.
McWhorter: Exactly.
Mounk: What are the pronouns that English has lost? When you go back to Shakespeare, or to the Quakers, what kind of pronouns were they using that have fallen out of usage today?
McWhorter: If English were normal, we would say thou for one person and you for more than one person. Just as we have he and him, subject and object, we would have thou and thee. If English were normal, over in the plural, it wouldn't be just you, it would be ye as the subject and you as the object.
Mounk: Explain to us what the difference between ye and you would be?
McWhorter: Ye was the subject. Ye sit there, or Hear ye, for example. You was only the object. So, Helen and Fred, I see you. Ye ought to sit down now. We're about to eat. Of course, that's not Middle English, but you get my point.
Mounk: So it's like we're distinguishing between we and us.
McWhorter: Precisely. Or, like he and him. That was practiced in a way that would be unfamiliar to us now. Then, in early Middle English and before that, there was wit and git. Wit meant we two. We meant me and two or more people. Git was you two and you was if it was more than you two. So, we had dual pronouns which many languages have. That was an early Germanic thing. We kept them and then we let them go.
Mounk: What about one of the most striking features about pronouns in the English language, that is, distinctions of politeness? Many languages encode distinctions of politeness in which pronoun you use. In French that is tu and vous, in German it is du and Sie. Is it a coincidence that English doesn't have those?
McWhorter: It's a mystery to an extent because it really starts to fall away in the 1600s. It used to be that you would say you to somebody who was above you and you would say thou to somebody who was below. Then, it got to the point where you was the polite form and thou was what you used with kids and intimates. In other words, the normal European language routine. That's what Europe does. But for English, you, from the plural, just started taking over and became the singular form. We therefore didn't have polite pronouns. We can be very explicit and say, your highness, or we can address somebody as sir, but we no longer had our vous.
I wish that I could have written in the book that it's because of the origins of bourgeois culture among anglophones, or that people didn't know what to use with one another because there were so many newcomers in the city or something like that. But all of those things could also describe Oslo, Berlin, Moscow, Rome. Those were happening all over the European continent. The reason thou disappeared in places like London, Oxford, and Cambridge—while it persisted in the countryside and still does in some areas—is partly just that there is a genius to English. By genius, I mean that there's an essence to the way English grammar is, that was set in place when Vikings beat up the language starting in the eighth century. English likes to take it lightly. Linguists don't fully understand why some languages are like this and some aren't, but it's certainly the case that some languages want to be harder and some languages just would rather have as little furniture as possible. All languages are getting complex in various ways, but when it comes to pronouns as well as aspects of verbs, English wants to be left alone, and that has continued with the pronouns right up through eliminating thou completely rather than maybe making its area narrower. The latter is what a normal language would have done. So we just make do with less.
Mounk: It's interesting, of course, that when some linguistic convention is older, we naturally associate it with formality, which is a little bit strange. It's not obvious that people were generally more formal in the 16th century than they are today. If I went around New York today saying, It’s very nice to see thee, people would think, A, that I'm a little deranged, and B, that I'm being very, very formal. Whereas, in fact, you're pointing out that thou was the informal form and you was the formal one. But that's not how we would instinctively hear it today.
McWhorter: Yeah, it's funny. Being the age I am, having grown up in the 70s and 80s and having loved teaching myself languages, I would learn from French textbooks that it's not like what you see in old movies. More people call each other tu. I heard that with German du as well. That's the way it was in the late 20th century. But funnily, in English, you would expect, therefore, if it were that kind of thing, that thou would win. But instead, it was the vous form that won, which is exactly what you wouldn't have expected. And yet here we are today.
Mounk: To what extent can collective social or political judgments influence the language in that way? A story I've heard about Sweden, which was a comparatively egalitarian society, but particularly after the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, it really came to be ill-seen to use the formal form. As a result, the informal form has really taken over in that society. Do you think that that is an organic social development? Can there be these forms of political agency? Are there examples in which—either in the case of pronouns or, of other really fundamental features of a language—the decision of a king or of some other very powerful person fundamentally influences the trajectory of that language, leading at the extreme to something like the loss of a formal form of a pronoun?
McWhorter: It's hard to impose things on casual speech, as opposed to writing. But, where it does happen, it's going to tend to be in relatively small homogenous communities with, perhaps, a kind of pride. That Swedish story is one that took place in a very compact nation, which was until relatively recently quite homogenous with a very distinct sense of its own traditions. That kind of fiat combined with their being a common feeling literally among almost all people was such that you could chase away the vous form in the way that they have. That would have been much less likely in Russia, China, and other larger and more diverse nations. That's why it's so hard to really do it, for example, here in the United States.
Mounk: You were talking earlier about areas where some useful word might be missing in a language. I believe you said that about the word for “sticking out” in French. There's just no compact way of saying that. You seem to believe that the English use of pronouns has one such problem. If I am in a room full of people and I say you it can sometimes be ambiguous whether I mean you as in, John, or whether I mean, all of you people in this room who are hearing what I'm saying right now. Of course, there's instinctive workarounds that people have sometimes created to that problem, like the use of the word, y’all. Is that a problem in our accounting? It feels like you have a preference for reintroducing those words, not necessarily by a linguistic commission headed by some dignitaries, but in an organic way. You feel like it is a positive development that we seem to be getting the reemergence of some of those forms like y’all.
McWhorter: You know something? I never thought of it this way, and it is always a healthy way to think, to reclassify things. Talk about a ding in French or in Russian. English's ding is the pronouns. The ding in English is that we don't have a way of saying thou. We are trying to do it with things like y'all. The problem is that once a language is highly codified, standardized, and you see it spontaneously in written form in your head, rather than just spoken, It's hard to make fundamental changes like that, especially with pronouns, because they're not really just words. They are tools. They're nails. They're screws. They're blood vessels. And so it's hard to do anything different. That means that when y'all comes in, it can only be considered slang. It can't be considered a new word that you put in the dictionary without marking it as slang. Therefore, we are trying to be like normal languages because it really is awkward to not have a way of saying thou, but those ways can never be official. I think one thing that we're noticing given the increasing informality in American and other Western societies is that, outside of the South and the Black community, y'all is catching on ever more in colloquial circumstances. I see the kids at Columbia—who are not often from the South—trying to make this language normal by using y'all to an extent that their equivalents, i.e. me when I was in college, were not using it. That's because we have a ding. I think it's only going to get as far as it's gotten. Also, you guys—it'll never be standard, but at least we're using it because we did need it.
Mounk: Yeah, it's interesting, even in my presence in the United States, 20 years ago I would have felt like I'm pretending to be a Southerner if I said y'all. It would have been very strange. Whereas, now I think sometimes in verbal language, I do use it. But if I was addressing my students at the beginning of the semester and I wrote, Hi, y'all, that would still feel very odd to me. I wouldn't do that.
McWhorter: Never. But you could say, if you and I were at some conference, See y'all at dinner, if you were feeling kind of jolly. That's becoming normal because we need it.
Mounk: So one of the dings in the English language is that we have trouble expressing certain kinds of plurals. We've gotten the introduction of what's called the singular plural, which is controversial in two ways. It is controversial because prescriptivists often dislike that kind of linguistic innovation, so it's controversial in the same way as y'all, but it's also controversial in a second sense because it has become bound up with the whole debate about gender and questions surrounding trans topics. Explain to us the nature of the ding, how the singular “they” may be a solution to that, and how we should think about it.
McWhorter: Yeah, there are times when you don't need to refer to gender. Context takes care of that 99.9% of the time. There are times when you really don't need it or want it. So, in English, really since Chaucer, it's been possible to say things like, a person can't help their birth. You don't say his birth, nor her birth. Both of those feel too specific. So, that's not new. That's just been part of what many people thought of as the best English, including the best authors, since time immemorial. But grammarians had this idea, and once again it had to do with the worship of Latin and Ancient Greek—that they had to be plural because it was, once, only plural. If you're going to look at how they is used in Beowulf, it's only plural. But language changes and pronouns change too. It was long thought that “they” could be used in the singular, frankly. If we had a larger corpus of Old English, I would bet quite a lot of money that it was already being used that way then, but it just doesn't happen to be preserved. Even if the Strunk & White version of things in The Elements of Style tells us that we're not supposed to say, tell each student that they can hand in their paper after 5 o'clock, we all do it. You might not write it. Your editor might not let you write it if you write for the public. But everybody says it. Nobody hears anyone say that and thinks, I'm not sure what they mean. Do they mean they in the plural or a singular person? Then, come to roughly 2015 and the non-binary person wants a pronoun that makes sense for them. It makes sense to think that we could make up a pronoun, partly because that would be fun. A lot of us like to make up words and make up languages, but a pronoun can't catch on. You can't bring in a new one, because they're not just words, they're tools. We use them too often to use a brand new word. What do you have that you can use? There's some languages where they would have had 50 pronouns to choose from. That is not us. So, really, the only thing that makes sense is to refer to non-binary people as they. We have a job to do because we need to adjust to something that does not feel natural at first. But I very much think that we can all master it with just a little patience and practice.
Mounk: That's very interesting because you're taking a middle position in this linguistic question that also doubles as a culture war. On one side, there are the people who say that the way to use the English language in this kind of way is just really strange and referring to somebody as they is an aberration of the English language. On the other hand, there's a lot of people who do want to use neo pronouns, and say ze and zir—which sounds like a German is speaking—and all other pronouns that are invented with a political purpose of liberation. You're saying, get off your high horse about they—as a reference to a person, it’s perfectly fine, but stop trying to invent these new pronouns, it’s just never gonna work. Is that roughly right?
McWhorter: Yeah, and it's not that I don't see the fun in the invented pronouns, but ze and the rest are never going to get any further than Latinx. Latinx is not illegitimate just because it's only used among artists and intellectuals and activists. Many people seem to think there's something wrong with that. But it's not going to be used by the Latino person on the street. That's just not going to happen. And it's the same way with ze. I wish it were otherwise, but that means that we have the challenge of using they. It’s a challenge because in speech—especially with he/she—those just aren't the way human beings talk, so we can't rely on the strategies we use in writing. That’s why I like they. I think that it's the right thing to do morally and it also does add one more distinction—although with a homonymy—in our pronominal system that really has needed them. You also don't see language change happening much. Generally it happens very slowly, but in this case you actually get to see something happening. For example, if you watch an old movie or read old books, the words wonderful and fantastic mean different things. When someone says, I don't want to be fantastic about this in 1925, they mean, I don't want to let my imagination run away with me. If somebody in Jane Austen says that something's wonderful, they don't mean that it's great. They mean that it's wondrous, that it's magnificent, it makes you wonder. That sort of thing is happening all the time. There's still people who use fantastic in that way, especially literary people and old people. But you can't feel it coming. You can't feel it happening. Whereas with the new they, as I say in the book, it seemed to pop up sometime between when the TV show The Office ended and when Donald Trump came down that escalator. Here we are, watching something happen. I just say, let's watch, because it's not going to stop. It's already too well established, at least among a certain set. If we are around or among that certain set, it's just something new to accept, I think.
Mounk: One of the things that's interesting about language is that this prescriptive instinct is very hard to realize—telling people that they should now use the language in a certain way. We've invented a new pronoun and it's very hard to make it work. The other thing is that it seems to reveal how we perceive the world—whether we want to or not—in ways we don't always fully control. I have one controversy about pronoun use in mind. During the last Dutch election campaign, there was a far-right politician on a Dutch TV talk show and there was a trans guest who, I believe, was a male to female trans woman. This far-right politician deliberately kept saying he as a way to indicate that he did not believe in trans ideology and that he would not pay this person the courtesy of referring to her by her preferred pronoun. At some point another politician who was invited to this talk show got very annoyed, turned to this far-right politician and said, stop doing this, this is disgusting, can't you see that you're hurting him?, referring inadvertently to the trans person by that pronoun. What do you think about how the use of pronouns can give us away—and show that even for this particular, more left-leaning politician, who was clearly committed to being courteous to these trans guests (as I would want to be) and who at some level does believe that a trans woman is a woman—in that heated moment of linguistic use, it seemed to betray that, at some level, his mental mapping is a different one?
McWhorter: That can't be denied. We're in a really interesting time there because it's no longer a rarity to know someone who was born as one gender and now identifies as something else. It requires a mental exercise of thinking about your use of pronouns when it's usually not what you think about. You think about your use of real words, not the pronouns. It's like having to think about the way you walk. The truth is that usually with trans people, it's rather evident what they were born as, and that has nothing to do with any kind of disapproval, but you can see it, and you're used to tying that appearance with a certain pronoun. That's the same kind of work as using the new they. I've only known one person who transitioned well, a colleague of mine who went from man to woman. It took me some years to say she instead of he and to do it spontaneously so that I would never mess up. because I genuinely came to process them as a woman. That was hard. They would get a little peeved at me for messing up the pronoun, I remember, but it didn't help. I was mentally locked in. All of us are going to have that issue and I think most trans people will understand it on some level, especially if that person is upset, and they say he because they're really processing a he even if they respect that the person has decided to identify as she. I think all of us will have similar experiences.
Mounk: Since I've made the bridge to Europe, there's an interesting set of questions in German that I'd always wanted a linguistic expert to give me their opinion on. I'm going to abuse this occasion to make you that person. There's a very strong conviction left of center, but to some extent in the German mainstream as well, that certain generic nouns imply that everybody is a man. For example, the word for student in the plural is Studenten and the word for a group of exclusively female students is Studentinnen. So, there's this idea that if you say, the lecture hall was full of Studenten, that implies that they are all men. As a result, they now often use Studierende which literally means, people who are in the process of studying right now, in a way that supposedly is more gender-neutral, less in the context of trans questions and more in that of not implying this generic masculine plural form. I would love to hear your opinion on this and whether you think that underlying theory of social change holds. Is it actually true that when people today say, die Aula ist voll von Studenten, meaning, the auditorium is full of students, what anybody would picture is a room with exclusively male students? If we successfully get people, as we have to some extent in German, to transition to saying, die Aula ist voll von Studierenden, meaning, the lecture hall is full of people in the process of studying, does that actually change the mental image we have in the world? Of course, there's an underlying additional aspect of this theory of social change, which is that, somehow if the mental image of a student changes, that makes us think differently of the appropriate role of women in society or young women might more easily picture themselves as going off to university and pursuing those careers and so on further down the line. Does that seem realistic to you or not?
McWhorter: See, it goes language by language. It's been shown that in French, where you have, for example, ils versus elles for they, so ils for boys, elles for girls, that when you use il in a gender-neutral way, it does encourage a picturing more of men than women. You don't spontaneously picture men and women when the word il is used. Now, if we're talking about students—I'm flying by the seat of my pants here, so Studenten and Studentinnen—I think if you talk about a room full of students based on what today's reality is, Studenten makes you picture a room full of men and women. You don't picture a room full of guys in a line like they would have been in 1865 in Prussia. Studenten means both. Studentinnen makes you imagine a room full of girls. There's no way to give a word that would imply that they're all men. Actually, it's only women that you could be specific about. If you have some other way of doing it, such as the Studierende, that's actually clever. I wonder if that works with everything, but Studierende means that you're not really picturing gender at all. Will that be better for women? I'm not sure that anything needed to be fixed. But then again, let's say it wasn't students. Let's say that it was pilots where you spontaneously imagine male pilots.
Mounk: Piloten for the plural masculine and Pilotinnen for the plural feminine. It's interesting, though, I don't think there is in fact a gerundive in that case. Pilotierende would be the gerundive, but I've never heard anybody use that. That sounds very cumbersome.
McWhorter: But maybe they should because then women would be more spontaneously imagining themselves as pilots. It's hard for me to do this because I'm not in the society. I'm all on board with finding gender neutral pronouns, which apparently is happening all over Europe. What is it in German? Is it Xier? You've never heard it?
Mounk: Nobody uses that. The solution in German is quite odd to me. In written German, you have a little star, what's called a gender star. So it's, Student*innen. But of course, there's no way to represent that star in spoken language. I believe it is a doomed exercise, but I'd be interested in hearing your opinion on this. What you hear in left-leaning highly educated spaces is a little pause that is meant to represent that gender star. So what people will say naturally is Studentinnen, or Studenten, or Studierende, but what they'll say in those spaces is Student—innen [with a short pause].
McWhorter: That's never going to catch on except in those spaces.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and John discuss whether the woke wave has crested, and what comes next. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
