Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words

This piquant study from McWhorter (Woke Racism), a linguistics professor at Columbia University, explores the twisty history of pronouns. Tracing the etymology of each, McWhorter details, for instance, how the word eg, from the ancient Proto-Indo-European progenitor of most European languages, evolved into I in English, ik in Dutch, and yo in Spanish. English once had several second-person pronouns (thou, thee, ye, you) to distinguish singular/plural and subject/object uses, McWhorter notes, recounting how the imposition of English on Celtic peoples and the arrival of Scandinavian invaders in Britain in the centuries prior to the 1066 Norman invasion kickstarted a gradual simplification process during which large numbers of people learning English as a second language struggled to keep up with such distinctions and settled on only using you. McWhorter defends the use of they to refer to gender nonbinary individuals, pointing out that authors as old as Geoffrey Chaucer used they as a singular pronoun, and arguing that it’s futile to resist language’s ever-evolving mutations. The etymology fascinates, and light humor enlivens what might in lesser hands become stuffy (“What’s with I and me? While he and him are clearly siblings, me seems brought in from somewhere else, like a sibling from Dad’s first marriage”). Word nerds will find much to ponder. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House. (Apr.)