John McWhorter Asks: ‘Is it You or Me or They?’

The nature of language is to shift and evolve. But every so often, a new usage creates a whole lot of consternation. These days, pronouns are throwing curveballs, and it matters, because pronoun habits die hard. Professor John McWhorter, who teaches linguistics, American studies, and music history, looks at these issues in Pronoun Trouble.  

If you need a refresher from eighth-grade English: Pronouns are short, used endlessly, and serve to point and direct, to orient us as to what is meant about who. Him, not her. Me, not you. Pronouns get a heavy workout, and as such, they become part of our hardwiring. To mess with our pronouns is to mess with us.

Many of today’s hot-button pronoun controversies, however, are nonsense, as McWhorter makes clear in his book. The singular they has been with us since the 1400s, and appears in Shakespeare’s works. In fact, many of the supposedly iron-clad rules of grammar are up for debate (Jane and me went to the movies is perfectly logical!). With trivia, twists, and the quirks of early and contemporary English, McWhorter guides readers on a journey describing how pronouns emerged and have changed over time.

McWhorter discusses the book with Columbia News, plus shares details on his current projects and his summer plans.

What was the impetus behind this book?

It happens that many of English’s pronouns tell interesting stories, which helps me get across a key lesson I try to impart—that every word in a language is the end point of a kind of tale. Of course, what made me think readers would “bite” is the current controversy over the new usage of they, but I also wanted especially to discuss the myth that to say, “Billy and me went to the store” is to commit a grammatical error akin to saying, “The book are on the table.”

Can you provide examples from the book of how pronoun usage has changed over time?

The saddest thing in English is that we used to use thou for one person and you for two or more, but now we make you do the work of both and reject attempts to fix this—such as “y’all” and “youse”—by calling such examples slang. A language wants to have both a singular and a plural “you.” There even used to be a “you" especially for two people, pronounced “yeet.” And “thee” was the object form of “thou,” while “ye” was the subject form of “you,” and “inc” was the object form of “yeet”! All so rich, now whittled down to just sad little “you.”

What are you working on now?

I’m thinking about a book on buzzwords as my next project. My next academic articles will be about how some verbs in Mandarin become ways of indicating subtle things like abruptness or continuation—kind of like the Cheshire Cat fading away and leaving just his smile—and on the new way of indicating frustration by ending a sentence with “uh,” as in, “You have plenty of room-UH!”

What books have you read lately that you would recommend, and why?

James by Percival Everett revisits Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and is, if you ask me, more engrossing. Beverly Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover, G-Man, is about a person much more interesting than he might seem. Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders follows a young, widowed mother in the 1600s in a small village coping with a plague, and would be just as powerful, even if we hadn’t just been through one ourselves. 

What’s next on your reading list?

I’m about to start Samuel Jay Keyser's The Mental Life of Modernism: Why Poetry, Painting, and Music Changed at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, and am in the middle of Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (one must, at least once). 

Summer plans?

A little time in Venice with my daughters, a trip to Chattanooga to receive the 2025 Richard Dawkins Award, and then six weeks hiding in the Catskills before Labor Day.