When Vice President Kamala Harris announced her pronouns while introducing herself to pro-abortion disability rights activists, she also described what she was wearing: “I am Kamala Harris. My pronouns are she and her. I am a woman sitting at this table wearing a blue suit.” All others at the conference table mimicked the process in some way.
The bit about clothing is supposed to be helpful to the visually impaired. My guess is that it’s there to signal more woke virtue and thereby enhance the Pronoun Project.
When the video made rounds on social media, a lot of people were amazed by the absurdity of it all. However, when high-level public figures put on such performances, the goal is to portray the behavior as normal so more will do the same until there’s a cascade of public acceptance. Indeed, declaring one’s pronouns—saying things like “I go by he/him” or “My pronouns are xi/xir/they”—has become a ritual in much of academia and the corporate world, where people have started wearing pronoun badges.
Those who promote the practice claim it’s only about good manners and avoiding the risk of marginalizing people by making assumptions about how they identify. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Progressive Pronoun Project is plain old social engineering. And it disrupts the natural flow of human communication at every level. We all know that.
Abuse of Language Is the Centerpiece of Tyranny
George Orwell famously warned that if we keep corrupting the English language, we’ll eventually start spouting dangerous nonsense like “Freedom is slavery” and “War is peace.” Indeed, turning the language into unintelligible mush serves to turn people into fools who can be controlled. We’ve all seen how the media and our institutions are enforcing this farce. This abuse of language is bound to destabilize thought, especially in children.
There are really no good manners to be found in these tyrannical circus acts. Rather, there’s only the Alinskyite rule to use the good manners of good people against them in order to attain power. How does this work?
There is far more to pronoun usage than someone’s personal preference in how he or she wishes to have others refer to him or her. The woke tyranny affects all pronoun usage because it de-constructs our entire language.
A pronoun must have a clear antecedent and context if a statement is to be universally understood. Using unintelligible pronouns with vague antecedents undermines this comprehension.
If we accommodate the pronoun police, we contribute to communication failure. And that’s isolating. If we cannot speak openly to others, we end up more alone, even atomized, and therefore easier to control. Ultimately, the craze to abuse pronouns drifts towards nihilism because it replaces ordered communication with chaos.
Using Woke Pronouns Undermines the Function of Language
Few people appreciate the extremely important role pronouns play in the structure of language. Linguists describe pronouns as “function words.” They are not meant to describe content like other parts of speech, such as adjectives, nouns, or verbs. Unlike pronouns, those don’t have antecedents.
We can often make up new nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs that enhance understanding by communicating new ideas or moods. For example, “When Junior fired that blaster-offer, it light-yeared itself into the blue in a tsunamied instant!” We cannot do that with pronouns because they are referential terms: They indicate relationships to words or terms that precede them in speech and writing. Toddlers instinctively understand the distinction when they are learning language.
By way of illustration, follow the bold italics to see how dependent our language is on pronouns. How did we allow the current social chaos to happen? Who knows? (Anyone?) It metastasized because we didn’t push back.
In part, this resulted from the ignorance cultivated in education. Much was also due to our longstanding faith that all strive for a society based on fairness and due process. Few realize that power elites who are invested in social engineering frequently try to isolate us in order to control everybody, often by compelling their speech. However it happened, pronoun enforcement has become a political feature in the media, Big Tech, and all our institutions. Such is the absurdity of our times.
You should be able to see that pronouns are like indispensable scaffolding upon which our entire language depends. So let’s not mess with them.
If pronouns are never used—or if we force improper use of them—we end up with a massive communication breakdown. Let’s say Jenny’s preferred pronouns are “cake/cake/cakeself” (now that “cake” has joined the legions of woke pronouns). If you sincerely report: “Jenny said cake wants to walk by cakeself” instead of “Jenny said she wants to walk by herself,” you’ve gone down the rabbit hole. Jenny has invented a secret language that forces everyone she encounters to get a detailed briefing before engaging in the remnants of a conversation.
Abuse of language begins with the abuse of function words like pronouns. As Orwell warned, this is part and parcel of social engineering for tyranny.
We ought to know by now that gender ideologists are not interested in “equity.” Gender activists aren’t sincere. Most of them don’t even follow their own rules.
A good example is the self-identified nonbinary individual who insists you use the plural pronouns “they/them/their/theirs/themselves” whenever referring to him or to her. At the same time, that person tends to use only the first-person singular pronouns “I/me/my/mine/myself” when referring back to himself or herself. To be consistent, such activists should instead use the first-person plural pronouns “we/us/our/ours/ourselves.”
Oh, sure, they’ll tell you that you should use “they” in the singular. (But they doesn’t really mean it, does they?) Yes, there are occasions in standard grammar when “they”—with the corresponding plural verb—can be used to refer to an unknown, nameless person or thing. But the whole point of pronoun protocols is supposedly to help people live out their authentic, not unknown, self or “selves.”
So it’s beyond disingenuous to see the plural pronoun “they” so often treated this way. One of countless stark examples comes from a they-themist named Samuel Brinton, whom the Biden administration recently appointed to be a deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Energy. Brinton insists on using the singular “I/me,” not plural “we/us.” Yet he demands everyone else to engage in the contortions of referring to him as “they” with corresponding plural verbs.
At best, forcing people into such games of verbal whack-a-mole is extremely bad manners. At worst, it’s a direct assault on human communication. If we don’t comply with it, we’ll eventually see gender ideology hoisted with its own petard.
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Source: The Federalist
