Let my grammar freeeeeee!

With this letter, I shall start a revolution!

How many times have you typed “he/she” or just “he” or “one” and felt inarticulate, misogynystic, or completely abstracted? How many times, my fellow students?!

I propose that tomorrow we throw down prescriptivist hogwash and start writing that English neuter pronoun, the one that’s been hiding in common discourse for far too long!.

I mean, it just feels so good: “Who was that?” “I don’t know but THEY use the neuter pronoun in THEIR papers, and THEY’re wicked cool” Wrong? No, friends, oh so right.

What, you say it’s ambiguious? You say it does not make sense? You say Harbrace, Allan/Bacon, or Cheadle told you it was not correct English?

Well, let me tell you that I have substituted “they” for “he/she” several times and I have found much success. All you need is a context. Just a little old context. And what’s an utterance without a context? Seriously.

Language changes all the time. It is dynamic, liquid, like a river of . . . language.

Speech needs to fit the times. In the Puritanical grammar rule book writing days, dominated by men, “he” would suffice for a pronoun without a concrete referent.

Today, we’re concerned with political correctness and inclusion so we can’t say “he” but we’re also concerned with brevity so we can’t say “he/she.” We mute ourselves with adherence to antiquated rules!

The time has come to free ourselves from the senseless circumlocution that goes on when trying to avoid that word that we want to say oh so badly. Let it out friends, “They! They! They!”

Now write it down. Write it in your papers, in your memoirs, in your legal documents, in anything with which we can change the history of the printed word.

We, comrades, will take the OED by storm and make a mark so deep in it that it will never be erased. And that mark will read “They: 3rd Person, Singular, Neuter.”

Matt Picard CAS ’06 860-966-1309 mpicard@bu.edu