Only You

How a Cartoon Bear Knows English Grammar Better than Liberals

In English, whenever you are talking face-to-face with someone, there is only one acceptable pronoun: YOU. It is called the second-person pronoun (because if I am talking to you, I am the first person and you are the second person). You is the same in singular and plural. I say YOU when I talk to a man or a little baby, a teenage girl, a gang of thieves, the president, or a horse.

The only time I have to use a more descriptive third-person pronoun (she, he, they, etc.) is when the “second person” is not present. So if that person is not present, how do they even know if I’m using their “preferred pronoun”?

YOU is a marvelous word, it is wonderfully egalitarian. Language shapes thought as much as the other way around and a language that uses a pronoun that is the same for everyone is remarkably fair and decent. YOU works whether you’re talking to a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, an old person or a young person. It’s the same pronoun for all races, religions, creeds, and belief systems. It’s the same in the inner city as the rust belt and rural people use it as well. YOU works for one person, ten people, or billions of people. It can handle mixed groups (men, women, boys, girls) and people who are trying on new gender identities. A disabled person or a person with dementia is YOU, the same as a billionaire is YOU. It even works for animals.

Many other languages do not offer this. In German, for example, the second person in informal speech is either “du” or “ihr” depending on whether you’re talking to one person or more than one person. And if you are talking to someone in a more formal setting, such as a police officer or your future father-in-law, you use the more formal “Sie.” In German, the second person conveys a bit about the relationship between speaker and the person being spoken to. In other words, you can show disrespect with a poor choice of the second-person pronoun in German.

Not so in English. We’d say YOU to the King of England and YOU to the semi-conscious guy they drag out of a crack house. We say YOU to our boss and YOU to our dog.

It’s even more extreme in Chinese and other Oriental languages where there are multiple words for YOU that can be used to describe the other person and your relationship to that person. For instance, a kid in a big Chinese family calls his older sister YOU using a different word than he uses on his younger sister; and that word is different for older brothers and also for younger brothers. Just listening to two siblings talk in Chinese can tell you which is older. In many Asian languages, you call your spouse a different YOU than your best friend. As a matter of fact, in Vietnam, observers can tell the point at which a young man and woman have professed their love to each other: they switch the word for YOU. There is a close, intimate YOU for romantic couples and a more friendly platonic YOU for couples who might just be dating. And when it comes to relatives the Asian languages also change pronouns; you say YOU one way for a paternal grandmother and a different way for a maternal grandmother. I once asked a Vietnamese man how many different ways were there to say YOU in his native language; he tried to count and could never arrive at a final number. It was a lot.

Complicated stuff, but English is totally egalitarian. It’s YOU, YOU, YOU, and only YOU.

The only time I would need to use a third-person pronoun—words like “he” or “she” or “they”—is when the person I am talking to is not present. The third-person is far more descriptive but it’s not to be used for direct communication. That’s when I say “he is watching TV” or “she makes great tamales” or “they stole my car!” You can tell by that pronoun whether it’s one male or one female or a group.

The pronoun people want to dictate to us how we refer to them when they are not present and do not hear us. To be fair, sometimes genderized words are used that they could hear; for example, there are honorifics (Sir Lancelot or Madam Vice President) and there are gendered nouns, such as “ladies and gentlemen” but these are not pronouns. (Live by grammar, die by grammar.) They are legitimate words and cannot be excised from our language. You may not want to be called a “gentleman” but that is just too bad. I’m sure Joe Biden doesn’t like all the words that are used to describe him, either.

The aggravating issue with pronouns, in part, is the demand that some people wish to be recognized as something that is not visually apparent to the speaker. This was understandable to an extent when it was strictly a matter of gender identity—a man who identified as a woman wanted to be called by a feminine name and addressed as a lady. But what do you do when the subject has a beard and is wearing an evening gown? Confusing, and these people have been in our government (Sam Brinton).

Then came the onslaught of bizarre terms, like individuals wanting to be called “they” or people making up so-called neopronouns like “zhe” or “per.” The pronoun people tried to seize control of the language, even demanding strange and bizarre terms, like a young person I saw on TikTok who wanted to be called “clown.” Clown is not a pronoun. It’s a noun. And it’s quite refreshing that a clownish-looking person with bright orange hair demands to be referred to as “clown.” It just goes to show that when you get on the crazy roller coaster, there aren’t any brakes.

And just to understand how pretentious leftists are, an article in CNN announced that these words like clown or leaf or star are a new part of speech, the so-called “nounself pronouns.” Yeah, right, clown.

The neopronouns, invented words like “ve” and “xe" and “fae,” find no traction in English, because grammar is stronger than insanity. The laws of grammar can be bent, broken, maligned, ignored, and abused, but ultimately language is the “fingerprint” of how we think, and a few people with nose rings and face tattoos cannot upend the language. And ever notice how many people change their pronouns… back and forth? Demi Lovato was a “she” who entered in to a gender confused state, insisting she be called “they” in 2021, and then in 2022 was “she” again. It’s tedious.

Imagine having so few problems in life that you can sit around and obsess about how people talk about you when you’re not around. This is the truly the most-privileged generation.

The other abject stupidity in the pronoun riots is that these pronoun dictators specify two cases as if they were unique pronouns. Demi Lovato announced her new pronouns (same as the old pronouns) are “she/her.” Well, here is the deal. She and her are the same pronoun. The difference between she and her (and you forgot “hers”) is something they call “case.” Case is a grammatical term that indicates how the word is used.

In a lot of languages, case is very important; in English, word position in a sentence helps us with this, so we are less draconian about case than, say, Russian, but we still have subjects and objects (case). The word “she” is the third-person feminine singular when the word is used as the subject of the sentence. For example: “she is staring out the window.” The word “her” is the same exact pronoun (third-person feminine singular) but it is used as an object. For example: “I see her staring out the window.” “Her” is the object of my activity, namely she is someone I saw. There is also a possessive pronoun for the third-person feminine singular, which is “her” or “hers.”
”That belongs to Jill Biden; I’m sure that’s her stuff” and “I’m pretty sure that the baggie of cocaine left in the White House was hers.” (This is not an accusation, it’s a grammatical example…)

She, her (object), her (possessive) and hers are all the same exact pronoun. It would be linguistically tumultuous to mix them, like announcing your pronouns are “she/him” or “they/her.” You only need to announce one. And mixed pronouns are linguistic hari-kari. What do you do with this she/him mix: “She lives in the house and the mother lives with him.” Are those two different people? (They’re two different pronouns.)

Of course, when it comes to made-up pronouns like xe and ey, we might need a tutorial since these are fictious entries into American English.

So when it comes to pronouns, if I address you, I will call you YOU and unless you have listening devices, you likely will never know what I say about you when you’re not present. I tend to use standard English, which does not recognize neopronouns, articles endorsing them in CNN and The New York Times notwithstanding.

English has the greatest, most wonderful, egalitarian way of talking directly to people: YOU. You know I’m right.