2019’s word of the year is a pronoun. What were ‘they’ thinking?
In 2018, the American dictionary MerriamWebster’s word of the year was “justice”. The year before it was “feminism”. This year, it’s… “they”. Formerly the bland and ubiquitous pronoun used to describe more than one person, “they” has become the key operator in the new gender order, applied to the growing numbers who identify as “non-binary” – neither male nor female. Searches for the definition of “they” increased by 313 per cent in 2019 compared with 2018.
Have we reached peak insanity? I think we have. Political turmoil, the environment, anti-Semitism, the erosion of healthcare, welfare, freedom of speech – all of these are threatening to destroy society. And, yet, the word enjoying the greatest surge of interest is not a technical geological, political or historical term, but a pronoun used by people who find the very concepts of male or female oppressive.
The rocketing in searches for the term reflects the sensibilities of the younger generation, and maybe some older people have been driven to see what it’s all about. A Pew Research study revealed that a third of Americans aged 18 to
Searches for the definition of ‘they’ increased by 313 per cent
29 know someone who goes by “gender-neutral” pronouns – twice the number of people in their forties, and triple those in their fifties and sixties.
The entry helpfully provided a number of examples of how to use the term. The content is as disconcerting as the fact that non-binary pronouns have become something we all have to grapple with.
Examples included “during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Representative Pramila Jayapal noted that ‘they’ is her child’s pronoun”. Her child’s pronoun? Whatever happened to childhood being about climbing trees and sneaking cigarettes behind the bicycle sheds at school? For some, it seems to have been replaced by a controlling pernicketiness about gender self-identification.
The irony underpinning all this, of course, is that those who insist on inserting non-binary pronouns into our syntax are part of an evergrowing number of warriors of woke who believe gender is an oppressive construct and want to dismantle it. They define themselves, of course, as progressive.
And, yet, their fixation with gender – the urge to taxonomise and label and monitor – is anything but. Not only is it intensely bureaucratic in spirit (many institutions and companies now require people to denote their pronouns at the bottom of emails to avoid stigmatising non-binary people), it marks an inability to move beyond gender.
If the goal is to make it less important all round, to enable the focus on the person, not their sex, then the present preoccupation simply drags us all back into the mire of genitalia and its significance, with just as many rules and regulations as before – only new ones.