Happy New Year! In the warm and generous spirit of the holidays, we’re making this week’s bonus segment free to all. But there’s more: Until the end of the year, you can get 30% off a subscription to Booksmart Studios. You’ll get extra written content and access to bonus segments like this one. More importantly, you’ll be championing all the work we do here. Become a member of Booksmart Studios today.“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is a slog. It's repetitive, replete with archaic imagery and long — and so one can be forgiven for getting a bit sloppy with the lyrics. That's what happened with the phrase “colly birds,” which eventually mutated to “calling birds.” Wait, what's a colly bird? John explains.JOHN McWHORTER: For our bonus segment, I want to share something that I think is just a joy. The Twelve Days of Christmas — you know that Christmas carol that kind of goes on and on? You know, you’re singing it wrong and the kids are singing it right. Think about it: You're standing there and somebody starts singing that song and you've got some eggnog, or hopefully something stronger. And you know that eight-year-old who's standing there next to you, and maybe they've got the lyric pretty much down? But there's something that you always hear them do. I'm almost sure I did this at a certain age. And so it's (singing): “fiiiiive golden rings!” Well, everybody does that. Then you hear the little girl next to you: “four colly birds, three French hens, two turtle doves,” because they don't know what a “calling bird” would be. 🎶 MUSIC (Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters) 🎶So “four colly birds, three French hens,” right. But you know what? Do you know what a “calling bird” is? And yet, if you were writing the lyric, would you put that? Like, OK, a bird that calls, but who ever says, “Ooohhhh, look, it's a calling bird.” That's not something anybody says. And you know what? “Colly birds” is right! Nobody wrote about calling birds! That's something that people thought it was, because nobody knows what a colly bird is anymore. A colly bird is a bird that's black. It's coal colored, it's coaly. And then the sound changes. And so in earlier British dialects, you talked about, “Oh, that coaly bird,” except you'd say, “Well, it's a colly bird.” And so it's a colly bird!So five golden rings and then four black birds — not that they're calling; if you think about it, when you give people birds, usually they're petrified. They're not calling unless it's a talking parrot, and you just know that this song is not about parrots. So it's not “five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens”; it's colly! From now on, you should listen to that girl next to you — you know, let's call her Delia — and she's going “five golden rings, four colly birds, three French hens” and you say, “Oh no, no, no, Delia, it's calling birds.” No, it isn't.🎶 THEME MUSIC 🎶You think about yourself. It's colly birds and then the French hens — why are they French? That's another story. Then turtle doves and then a partridge in, apparently, an entire tree. You can see that’s a show in this song itself. But they're colly birds. Isn’t that nice? So there's the bonus segment for this episode.If you'd like to leave a comment or check out our other great podcasts— Banished and Bully Pulpit — or subscribe, please visit BooksmartStudios.org. Our producers are Matthew Schwartz and as always, Mike Vuolo, and I am John McWhorter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

An alphabet, one of humanity’s greatest innovations, is far from intuitive. Our own English lettering was borrowed from the Romans, of course, but where did they get it from? And where did the concept originate? John has answers. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

To continue our celebration of the re-release of 10 original Lexicon Valley episodes with Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield, we’re making today’s bonus content free for everyone. Presenting the fan-favorite “Lexiconundrum” — a portmantastic puzzle for the ages. This week, an homage to Bob’s ancestors.* TRANSCRIPT *MATT SCHWARTZ: Hey, Matt Schwartz here, one of the executive producers at Booksmart Studios. This week's bonus Lexicon Valley is a remastered gem straight out of the archives: the short-lived but much-loved Lexiconundrum. I like to think of these not as mere word puzzles, but as a lexical challenge — a test of your linguistic wits. So without further ado, I present to you Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo.BOB GARFIELD: Each week, for our listeners, you are gonna come up with what I call the Lexiconundrum. Tell us what this week's Lexiconundrum is. MIKE VUOLO: This first Lexiconundrum is a kind of homage to you, Bob. Your name, Garfield was not your ancestors' original name. It used to be—GARFIELD: Garfinkle.VUOLO: So your ancestors, presumably upon arriving through Ellis Island, do you think somebody arrived at Ellis Island whose name was, like, Martin Garfield and he was like, “I wanna be called Hymie Garfinkle”?GARFIELD: To Judaicize their names? (Laughs.) Yeah, I don't think you don't see much of that. VUOLO: But maybe one reason that your ancestors settled on Garfield was that it preserved the vowel progression in their last name: A I E. So my challenge to the listeners is to find a name — a name of somebody relatively famous; not your cousin, not your nephew — whose first and last name has the vowels A I E in that order, and no other vowels. And just to make it simple for the purposes of this challenge, we will not consider the letter Y to be a vowel. So for example, Charlie Daniels of the Charlie Daniels Band, Charlie and Daniels both have A I E — and only those vowels — in that order. Daniel Radcliffe, he is the actor who played Harry Potter in the Harry Potter movies.GARFIELD: Well that’s good, Mike. So you've not only given us the puzzle, but also the solution. VUOLO: Well, those are two solutions which are now ineligible. You have to come up with another one. GARFIELD: I’m on it. Well, that wraps up the shakedown cruise of Lexicon Valley. All right, Mikey, later gator.(Music)SCHWARTZ: In the original airing, listeners had about a week to think of their answer and email it in. You have 10 seconds. But you can always hit pause while you think about your answer and tweet it to @LexiconValley. All right, ready for the solution? Here we go. VUOLO: Last week, I revealed that your ancestors’, Bob, changed their name from Garfinkel to Garfield, and noted that both names have the vowels A I and E in that order. And I challenged our listeners to come up with a name of somebody famous whose first and last name has the vowels A I and E in that order, and no other vowels. GARFIELD: And you gave a couple examples, which I had assumed had covered the entire universe of correct answers for this Lexiconundrum.VUOLO: I gave the examples Charlie Daniels, of the Charlie Daniels Band, and Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter in the movies. And a lot of people submitted entries, many of which had the vowels A I and E in both names, but also other vowels. So they didn't count. The first correct submission was by John Delano with Xavier McDaniel, who is a former basketball player with the SuperSonics. Also a listener named Curtis Earhart was the first to submit Hattie McDaniel. Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win an academy award for her role as Mammy in Gone With the Wind. I didn't know this, but apparently half the population of this planet has the name Javier Martinez. So there were a lot of those entries. And, you know, half of those are, like, South American soccer players. A few other noteworthy entries: Clara Loganoff was the only person to submit Reiner Fasbender, the German filmmaker. Frankie Lane was actually the name that I had in mind when I issued the challenge. He's a singer with a bunch of hits in the 1940s and 50s. Stephanie from Alaska guessed that one. But perhaps my favorite submission is Charlie Laine. And I'll quote directly from the email: “Charlie Laine is an American porn actress with 177 credits on IMDB” — 177!* — “including Girls Kissing Girls 8, and curiously,” says the emailer, “Ashlynn Goes to College 3, this time for her PhD, I suppose.”GARFIELD: Yeah, by the way, Ashlynn Goes to College 3? Not half as good as Ashlynn Goes to College 2, which — my view — masterpiece. VUOLO: Really? I'm really looking forward to number four. I think that that's the one where they're gonna introduce 3D. GARFIELD: (Laughs.) Okay. I think, I think this has to stop.—Editor’s note: At the time of this re-airing, Charlie Laine now has 222 credits on IMDB. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

To celebrate the re-release of ten original Lexicon Valley episodes — remastered, ad-free and for paying subscribers only — Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield return as hosts for this special show about the word “happiness.” Please let us know if you’d like more episodes from the archives, or more Mike and Bob, or both! (As seemingly indefatigable as he is, John McWhorter does, in fact, require occasional time off.) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

We’re giving John McWhorter a well-deserved day off. But the show must go on, so we’re bringing back a couple of Lexicon Valley legends for a special reunion episode. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

The late philosopher Paul Grice formulated four brief maxims by which conversations are generally governed. Most humans find it relatively easy to observe them. Machines, on the other hand, not as much.Normally, John’s Lexicon Valley bonus segments are behind the subscriber paywall, but we’re making this week’s bonus segment free for everyone. With more content now than ever before, we are deeply grateful for your attention and hope that you’ll become a Booksmart Studios supporter. Happy Thanksgiving week!* TRANSCRIPT *🎶 THEME MUSIC 🎶JOHN McWHORTER: So what we learned about today with the irony was, in broader perspective, about maxims. It's the maxims created by the philosopher of language Paul Grice — we linguists call them the Gricean maxims — and what the maxims are about are certain underlying assumptions that we make about conversation, about how we use language. These things are unspoken — nobody would teach them — but they are yet another way that we can see that speaking is not just about describing things and giving orders and asking questions. It's more than that; social interaction is weirder and richer than that.So with irony, what goes on is that you are breaking one of the maxims, and it's called the Maxim of Quality. The Maxim of Quality is an unspoken agreement that we make as people to, when we are communicating, tell the truth. The idea is that the default assumption is that we are calling upon somebody's attention in order to tell them something that is true. If you flout, as we say, the Maxim of Quality, it means that you don't tell the truth. Irony is all about flirting with, flouting, the Maxim of Quality. So “very funny” when it wasn't very funny. You flout the Maxim of Quality in order to communicate something, but the idea is that you broke this maxim. Now there are other maxims. The nice thing is that there aren't like 34. It's one of those things where you would imagine that Grice would have become one of these people to whom he has a hammer, and therefore everything is a nail. No, there aren't that many. There are only four. But another one — and one you end up thinking about after you think about the Maxim of Quality — is the Maxim of Quantity. What's the Maxim of Quantity? That is an underlying agreement that when somebody asks us for information, we tell them enough — not too much, and especially not too little. There's an agreement that we're actually going to give what the person was asking.And so let's say you have two children and somebody asks, “Do you have one child?” You're not supposed to answer “yes,” knowing that you actually have two because of course, it is true in the strict sense that you have one child. If you have two, you have two “one childs.” Yes. But if somebody says, “Do you have a child?” and you have two, you don’t just say “yes”; you say “Yes. As a matter of fact, I have two children.” That is, if you were going to fulfill the Maxim of Quantity. This reminds me of an anecdote somebody told me about being very far away and they were in a restaurant, and it had been a long day, and they asked, “Well,” [to] the waiter, “you have Kingfisher beer?” and the waiter says, “No, sir, we don't have Kingfisher beer.” So then he asked, “Well, do you have Sierra Nevada?” “No, sir. We don't have Sierra Nevada beer.” “Do you have an Amstel light?” “Sir, I'm sorry. We don't have Amstel Light.” “Wait a minute. Do you sell beer at all?” “No, sir. We don't sell beer.”That's not the way it's supposed to go. If somebody says, “Do you have Kingfisher beer,” you don't say, “No, we don't sell Kingfisher” knowing that you don't sell any beer at all. That's underselling it. You are flouting the Maxim of Quantity. It's not quite the thing that one does. And you know, there are two more of these maxims, and they're all about what it really is to talk. And this is the sort of thing that makes artificial intelligence hard, because how does the machine know that if it's asked, “Do you have one child?” — when its truth condition is that it has two children — that the answer is not “Yes, I have one child.” A machine is relatively easy to teach to answer a basic question, but how do you make the machine understand context? That is one of the massive challenges. And for reasons like this, actually, as the maxims go, quantity is the hardest one. There's an interesting study that was done recently by Mako Okanda, Kosuke Asada, Yusuke Moriguchi and Shoji Itakura — I am not going to pretend that those four names were not lots of fun for Anglophone me to say — but they did a study where they show that in terms of these maxims, quantity comes in the latest. Some forms of flouting quantity and understanding that that's what happened and that that's how language goes, people don't get until they are about six. This was done with Japanese kids. And so not until about six are you fully getting that.And if you think about it, that's about right. It's around six when your kids are understanding language completely in that contextual sense, where, within reason, you can use irony, etc. That is certainly the case with my two children. But that means that language is partly about maxims. We are in a Maxim House. Maxwell House Coffee! Remember the old commercials?Commercial Announcer: Mmm, smell good ground coffee!Where they used to somehow get across that Maxwell House is better than other coffee because it's good to the last drop? What did that mean? You know, what are the coffees where: Well, these are some of the last drops and it's not very good ‘cuz these are the last drops, and for whatever reason that would be — backwash or something like that — how is that different with Maxwell House? And of course, Maxwell House is not what most of us would consider good coffee. But here, just to close it out, this is an early 50s TV commercial. And it's about how Maxwell House is good to the last *whoop!* drop. That's the way they used to do it on the radio.Commercial Announcer: Pour a cup of this good smelling coffee. It will taste as good as it smells because it's good ground Maxwell House. Maxwell House Coffee is good to the last drop. Enjoy the rich, fresh taste of Maxwell House Coffee: The ground coffee that tastes as good as it smells every time. Maxwell House.🎶 THEME MUSIC 🎶This bonus segment has been about maxim house, but it got me thinking about coffee, although I, of course, drink better coffee than Maxwell House.If you'd like to leave a comment or check out our other great podcasts, Banished and Bully Pulpit, or subscribe, please visit BooksmartStudios.org. Our producers are Matthew Schwartz and as always, Mike Vuolo, and I am John McWhorter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

Language is tricky. It doesn’t do what you think it should. It’s as messy as almost anything that’s created by natural selection. And that’s what makes it so fun. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

Scrabble and other similar games have been the subject of an ongoing lexicographic debate in recent years, with some arguing that ethnic slurs have no place in the official dictionary or on the board. Many tournament players, however, decry the banning of words — the game, they say, is merely descriptivist. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

Dividing up nouns as “masculine” and “feminine” — like, for example, in Spanish — has not been a part of English for many centuries. And yet our language remains peppered throughout with gender, often overtly in terms like Mrs. and Mr., which evolved from “mistress” and “master.” Sometimes, however, it’s more subtle. John explains. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com

English has been calling out for a gender-neutral pronoun for more than a century, with many failed attempts at invented words and portmanteaus. Singular "they" — once the scourge of schoolhouse grammarians — has now emerged to become the pronoun of choice for many outside the so-called gender binary.TRANSCRIPTFrom Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter, and you know, these days, some of you probably know I'm writing pieces for The New York Times, and in The New York Times, not long ago, I wrote a piece about the new, new usage of “they.” And as you might imagine, I like it. Well, I've gotten a lot of very interesting feedback about my take on that. I wouldn't say hate mail, just mail from people very urgently telling me that I'm probably making a mistake, that I don't understand the full import of the call to use “they” in this new, new way. I'll let you know soon what I mean by “new, new.” I thought I would dedicate this episode to a response to people who just can't get with the new, new “they.” And it's not because they don't understand that language changes, but they see this as societally different from the way language generally changes. Folks, I get you, but let's talk about it. Let's talk about “they.”It's a word that's been uniquely subject to transformation. There's always something going on with “they” in English, it seems. Way back in Old English, the word for “they,” for one thing, was not what you'd expect. You'd think that would be something like thag or something. No, it wasn't. The word for “they” was HEE-uh, of all things. Hee-uh. And so, you just had to make do with that. And I say “make do” because HEE-uh is “they.” “He” is hē and “she” is hēo. So all of those are a little ominously similar. Hē, hēo, HEE-uh is “he,” “she,” “they” in the earliest English that we know. And if you talked about “to them,” like, you know, “give them the log,” “give the log to them,” then it was hem, just as it was in the singular. And so hem, “to him,” hem, “to them.” So there was a lot of this similarity. And it got really bad because, as you might imagine, hē and hēo, “he” and “she.” There were people who would say, just, hē for “she,” but then you've got hē and hē, meaning both “he” and “she” — hardly unheard of in languages, but this was a language where it hadn't been that way before. And of course, these things are different from dialect to dialect.So people would have known something is falling together. And then, HEE-uh. Well, after a while, you say that over and over and you might get hē, hē, hē. That was falling to sound like “he” and “she” too. This falling together would have felt funny to some people. And even if they weren't thinking of it consciously, it's the sort of thing where if English is the language that you're speaking — and English used to be a certain way — you might want to fix that. So you've got this HEE-uh that's just become hē and you've got the same word for “he,” “she,” and “they.” There are languages that do just fine like that, but English hadn't been one of them. Now, the old story about what happened to “they” in this situation is that English grabbed a word from Old Norse. The idea is that starting in 787 C.E. — I still think of it as A.D., but I'm told I have to say C.E. these days — the Vikings come, Scandinavian Vikings. They don't speak English, they speak Norse, and it's mostly men. They marry English speaking women. And next thing you know, there's this entire boatload of Norse words that come into English, including, you know, “get,” “happy,” “neck,” “skirt.” All of these are Old Norse words. They weren't originally in English. Well, it's supposed to be that something else came from Norse, and that is “they/their/them,” because in Old Norse, the word for “they” wasn't this HEE-uh thing. (Well, wrong voice for Old English.) HEE-uh — wasn't that. In Old Norse, It was þeir. Þeir. Not “they,” but þeir. Whole lot more like what we're used to than this HEE-uh thing. So it used to be thought (by many it still is thought) that English borrowed these pronouns from Old Norse. Now, I'm getting to something here. I'm not going into the weeds. I'm getting to this for a reason. It turns out that if you really look at that situation closely, and not many people had until relatively recently, the truth is that English didn't go grabbing pronouns from some other language. English used itself for this “they.” Old English had goofy gender, just like so many of the languages that you learn from English and are frustrated by. You had masculine, feminine and neuter. And for the most part, you just had to know. And then there was plural, which was all three. But this meant that you had four “thes.” “The” was different if you were in the singular, masculine, feminine, neuter. Then there was a plural “the.” That word was tha. And if you really look at how things appear in the documents and when and in what form, it's pretty clear that “they” came from this word for “the” that you use with a bunch of things. So “the ducks,” you know, “the Atari sets” or something like that. That “the” became “they.” So what happened is that the language, in a sense, needed or at least wanted a separate word for “they” and it lost it. And so, people were looking for some other one, and they went somewhere else in the language and they grabbed a word that roughly meant “the.” Or if you stretched it, it kind of meant “these” and “those.” This is a theory that is put forth most cogently (for those of you who are interested in these things and wondering where I'm getting it) by Marcelle Cole. But it is gaining increasing influence. I very much support it. And this is why I'm harping on it: Many people have written me that we need to create, for example, a gender neutral pronoun. So it can't be “he,” can't be “she,” shouldn't be “they.” We need to have something else. And so, there are  popular alternatives such as “ze.” And the truth is, people have been trying to create these for a very, very long time. There was a certain efflorescence in the 70s, one suggestion was, was “heesh.” That’s “he” and “she” put together.It would be very interesting, but you know, the truth is pronouns are seeded so deeply in our cognition. We use them so much. They label something as elemental as the other people in our lives and their relationship to our us and our us-ness. It's really hard to borrow pronouns from another language or to just create a new one. How do you slide that in? How do you start all over again? Of course, there may be people or even subgroups who are particularly interested in using this new word, and they will put themselves to doing it. But especially in a large society, how do you create new pronouns? In terms of how languages affect each other, they affect each other all the time, but they don't usually share pronouns. That's kind of like people sharing the same toothbrush. And so, in a way, what really happened in Old English — which was not grabbing something from Old Norse but almost certainly grabbing something from Old English itself — it means that if we're going to solve our problems with pronouns no longer seeming to correspond to the way a critical mass of people see themselves in a modern society, probably we need to recruit something that's already in the language rather than trying to create something brand new.Now, what I don't want to do here is repeat the show that I did on “they” before. I did an episode of Lexicon Valley, good while back now, 2018. It was called “The Rise of ‘They.’” I know that not many of you have listened to all — this is the 138th episode of Lexicon Valley that I've done, goodness gracious. Some of you have, and I am immensely flattered by your obsessiveness because you're like me, you're a completist. I listen to every episode of things, too. Most people haven't, and I can imagine most people weren't listening to this in 2018. But I did do it. And very quick summary is that the first “they” problem that people think of is what used to be called good old, singular “they.” And so, tell each student that they can hand their paper in when they want to. And that leaves you to not have to specify whether it is a boy or a girl or anything else. And you just have this generic reference. You're not being specific. And so, “a person can't help their birth,” that sort of thing. That was from Vanity Fair. And it's a hint that singular “they” isn't something that happened when apparently everything fell apart after the 60s, when people started using marijuana more openly or something. I don't know what's supposed to have happened recently that means that language just falls apart. But if Thackeray was already saying a person can't help their birth, you know that there's probably something about just the nature of English, where if you're looking for some sort of generic gender neutral pronoun, well, you take it from the resources of the language itself, and it is “they” for us. And it actually goes back to the 13 and 1400s. You've got it in Shakespeare. You've got it in Middle English, it doesn't even sound quite like English. Only in the 1800s, did certain, always self-appointed, grammarians decide that they didn't like singular “they” because “they” is plural. They're asserting this like it's something that’s undeniable and basic and unitary as the nature of protons and neutrons or something: “They” is plural.Well, you know, good for you. They said that. But in the meantime, people have kept on using singular “they.”But now there's what I sometimes call the new, new “they.” And this is the one that I wrote the Times piece about, and that seems to be eliciting some emotional reactions. And again, not from people who don't like language change, but from people who think that this time it's different. And so, I refer to, “Roberta wants their hair washed now. They're waiting downstairs.” And this doesn't mean that Roberta is waiting for some unspecified people who aren't her to have their hair washed. But the “they” is Roberta. Roberta wants their hair washed. Now they're waiting downstairs. Roberta refers to themselves as “they.” Or you might say, Roberta refers to themself. I suspect that's the way it's going to go. Roberta refers to themself as “they.”So, it's that new “they” that seems to really bother some people. And yeah, this is new. I didn't encounter it until not a few years ago, but a few more than a few. And you have to wrap your head around it if you didn't grow up with it. I should say that the kids are using it quite fluently, which shows that it's hardly incompatible with human cognition, but nevertheless this “they” is very, very different and it's ever more common. So sunny, non-prescriptive linguist like me says, “Well, this is wonderful. This is interesting. Things like this have happened in the past. Language always changes.” And then you get a whole bunch of mail saying, you know, “Professor McWhorter, I like blah, blah, blah, but on this one, I think that you're missing a larger context.” Interesting. Very interesting. And it's clear that the people who are writing this are very and genuinely upset. Oh, wait. Yeah. You're right, in terms of the pacing of a Lexicon Valley episode, it's time for a little break, not for a commercial, but for some sort of song. I have it as Roberta wants their hair. I don't know why, but whenever I think of the new, new “they” I think of Roberta. And it has nothing to do with any Roberta I know. Roberta D'Alessandro, if you're listening to this, it's not you. I've just got this generic new “they” person and her name is Roberta. Well, you know, there is a musical called Roberta, and it's from 1933. The words are by Jerome Kern and the lyrics are by Otto Harbach. Many of you know Roberta as a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film. And you might think that that was just written for them, but no, that was a Broadway property that was fashioned into a film for that. That's why they're kind of subsidiary in the film. But it was a show. And in any case, what didn't make it into the film, but what is in the lovely show score is this madrigal.  It's this choral piece. I've always liked this almost more than anything else in it, even though it's got a lot of songs in it that are famous if you like the American Songbook. This is the madrigal from Roberta. This is a newish recording of it in its original arrangement. Just listen to these beautiful voices doing this beautiful, plummy harmony together. This is the “Madrigal,” sometimes known as “Alpha Beta Pie.”Madrigal: Alpha Beta PieIs this time really different? Well, one thing that you might insert here is that having the same word in the second person for the singular and the plural, that felt weird to people when it started. That was something that was going on in the middle of the last millennium. And the idea that you say “you” to one person as opposed to thou — that sounds so antique to us now. But that's how English originally was. In Old English, that word was thou. Thou. That was normal, as it is in languages in general if you think about it. What's a language you know where the word for “you” is the same in the singular and the plural? Note that you have to unlearn that. Now, some of you who speak Hindi might be thinking that it's that way with your language. And really, Hindi and English are the exceptions that prove the rule. Normal languages have a separate word for singular “you” as opposed to plural “you.” And so, there were people who didn't like “you” being extended to the singular in this way at first because it felt strange. And this is something that's important: A lot of people are telling me that they don't like the new, new “they” because it's being imposed, that it isn't a natural development among the population. Instead, certain people are saying that it has to be that way.But you know, although the details are unclear, this use of “you” in the singular was something that came from on high. That is something that happened in the standard. Thou persisted and has persisted in very casual usage in a great many Englishs that are not prestigious in England, for example. A good example actually is if you read Lady Chatterley's Lover — I get the feeling that ever fewer people are actually reading it. But my mother, you know, as a young woman reading those sorts of five-foot bookshelf kinds of books (although that book was not one of them) had back in about 1960, before she married and had children and also had a whole career. But when she was a young woman and she had this copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It was a very nice addition. So I happened to read it kind of early because this book made you want to read it, and it's also a little bit dirty. And so, you find these things. And at one point, the groundskeeper says to Lady Chatterley, he says “'Tha mun come to the cottage one time.” Okay, so, “tha mun.” “Tha mun.” What the hell does that mean? It's thou must — “tha mun.” He speaks this Nottinghamshire dialect, and so, thou must come to the cottage one time. He wasn't trying to sound like he was in some silly play using archaic English. That thou was part of the local dialect. But no, in English, you know, the “you” ends up coming from the plural. And there were people who resisted it, including Quakers. Quakers continued using thou in the singular. They found it more humble than this idea that everybody would be exalted with this plural “you.” I went to a Quaker school as a kid, and I remember some of the teachers were using thou, thy, and thee. “Don't forget to put thy name on thy paper,” I remember that said to me. So, these things can be imposed, that's happened in the past.But more to the point, many people find the new, new “they” to challenge ready online understanding. Yes, that's true, especially if you're not used to it. You can hear people using it that way and they're talking about “they.” And you're wondering, well, who? What two people, what three people? Or maybe you're waiting for it to be the generic, old fashioned, singular “they.” But that doesn't quite make sense in the context, and then you have to wrap your head around the idea that one person who you all know is being referred to as “they” instead of “he” or “she.” And people are sending me whole paragraphs where you have to work to figure out what “they” is. And I can understand that frustration. Context can take care of so much, though, as we know with “you.” Really think about how odd it is, compared to any other language you know, that we say “you” to one person and “you” to two or three, and admit to yourself that sometimes it's even a little confusing. I sometimes will say “you” and realize that in my language, I can't specify that I'm talking to one person rather than both of them, such as, for example, my two daughters. And you know, you get by because that doesn't happen enough to matter. And my horse sense is that it wouldn't happen enough to matter with the new, new “they” once we got used to it.But, you know, maybe there is a transitional strategy, or maybe there is something practical that we can do to alleviate that feeling among people. And this is my proposal, and maybe it's been proposed elsewhere, but if it has been, I am definitely putting my hat into the ring for it. Maybe, in writing, the new, new “they” should be capitalized. This kind of capitalization can be quite arbitrary, for example, in the way we capitalize “I.” That's not necessary. If we didn't capitalize the pronoun “I,” and it was just lowercase, what else would we think it was? And yet we're used to that. Why don't we capitalize “they” when it refers to one person? In writing, you can't capitalize in speech. But if we're going to use it in writing (and we most certainly will, we must), then maybe we could capitalize “they” when it refers to one person. And here, we wouldn't be doing anything new because this is something that happens in various languages written in Roman. So in German, for example, you almost might wonder how they deal with the fact that sie, (that's s. i. e., sie) can mean “she.” It can mean “they.” And it's the formal way of saying “you.” Talk about how weird these things can get. Complain about how new, new “they” is different and it's confusing you, but think about German, and Germans seem to get along just fine. But sie is either “she,” “they,” or “you,” as in “sir” or “madam.” The way that you handle that in writing is that the formal sie is capitalized, so that helps a little bit.Or another example is in Italian. Italian has lei. Lei is “she.” Then it can also mean formal “you.” Think about how odd that is. You know, those of you who've taken Italian, you're so used to it. But think about how weird that actually is. This is just the way pronouns tend to be. They don't accept being put in little cages, but if lei means “she” and then also means “sir” or “madam, you,” well, then the way that they handle it is that when it's the formal “you,” then it's capitalized. So you have a capital L. I wonder if we could use a capital T with “they.” Not to indicate formality, but to indicate this new usage of “they.” So it would be a singular usage. That's just my proposal. I think that might be something useful to consider, and I'm putting it out here now.Let's get to what many people would think of as the meat of this issue. Many people are saying that they don't like this new, new “they” because a minority of people are insisting on being addressed in a certain way that everybody else finds quite counterintuitive. And the sociological tenor of society is such that if you don't do it, in many cases, you'll be given a very hard time. So people are saying, why should we do this just because people are demanding it? I feel manipulated. OK. This is how I feel about that. It seems to me, first of all, that having a pronoun to mark non-binary identity could be seen as pretty basic. It could be seen as something that a critical mass of people could agree is a moral advance. If you think about history, if you think about what seems to be the case in all cultures, there are people who feel like they are neither male nor female. There are people who feel like the categories of boy and girl just don't fit. Now, cultures vary widely, but just about any culture that I've ever had occasion to study has some room, usually some quiet room for people who just don't feel like that kind of categorization works — the non-binary person. Why can't our pronouns catch up with that?And of course, many people seem to think, well in terms of basic plumbing, there's the boy kind and the girl kind. And it's clear that people are born (except under extremely irregular conditions) with one or the other kind of plumbing. And there you go. So why are we being asked to model our language based on something that some people feel we should look at despite the fact that it doesn't seem to correspond with the way Nature supposedly had it? or something along those lines. But you know what? That doesn't convince me either, because think about formality. Think about that in a language like French, you have tu in the singular informally, but then formally you use the plural form vous because there's vous, your teacher, as opposed to tu, your friend. OK. Well, that's based on these issues of hierarchy. Now, in a small band of humans, which is how we began, there's a tiny bit of that, but not much, because there are, you know, there are only 100 of you. The idea that you have people above and people below, you know, let's do our Rousseau, that's what happens with creeping modernity. And next thing you know, you have these codes as to how people address one another from up high down to below and from down below to up high, etc. That isn't the way things started. It's something that happens in society because of a kind of a gradual accretion that nobody ever plans. And yet, languages are full of ways of indicating formality, including the one that I'm speaking. We just accept that.It seems to me that if that's seen as a refinement, just like, you know, the development of something called “cake.” Or like tea, how did anybody figure that out? We're going to take these leaves and burn them in the sun and then boil them in water, and we're going to pretend that's good. I just, that's — I actually like tea. But still, that's odd. Well, this issue of a non-binary orientation where you don't want to be a “she” or a “he,” that's a refinement. It wasn't something going on officially, certainly not in language 300 years ago, but frankly, look what happened to them. So it seems to me that it's a refinement.However, I know that that's not all that people are thinking. People are also thinking this: They're worried about the slippery slope. If we allow the new, new “they,” then the next step might be for people to say that everybody should be addressed as “they,” unless otherwise notified. Or maybe everybody should just be a “they” and we should try to get rid of “he” and “she.” And there are some scattered calls for that, you know, the polite thing being that everybody's a “they” unless otherwise notified. And I can very much imagine some people saying, why don't we just have everybody be a “they” and get rid of the whole idea that we have to mark in language this distinction between people with boy parts and people with girl parts? OK. That would be an interesting proposal. I can wrap my head around somebody who would propose it, but to tell you the truth, I'm not sure that there's a slippery slope that we would need to worry about here.This is my guess on this. If people called for “they” to be used in that way, it would be about as popular as the term “Latinx” is. “Latinx” is a very popular way of referring to Latino people without gender marking among a certain college town/activist group of people. And that's great, but it doesn't seem to be gaining any purchase beyond that. I live in a neighborhood where every second person lives in Spanish, and I have never once heard any of the people just walking around in the street using “Latinx” and you don't get the feeling they're going to. Surveys make it pretty clear that's the way it is. Calls to have “they” be universal and to marginalize “he” and “she” completely, that will get about as far as “Latinx.” And I don't think there's anything wrong with there being a register that is used primarily by highly educated people as opposed to the vast majority of people. The sky isn't going to fall if that happens, but I think that entities that call for “they” to be used that way would see their enrollments fall, and the bottom line would start to call the tune. I wouldn't worry about that slippery slope.But then there is another one. There are people who are telling me (and I completely get what they mean) that this business of using new, new “they” isn't just some linguistic development, but it's part of a whole new mindset, a whole new approach to sex/gender, where not only is it about pronouns, but it's about kids making decisions about not only their identities, but their bodies before they're possibly of age to be able to make that decision responsibly. Decisions being imposed on kids by their parents for the same reasons. Issues of who should use which restrooms and why. Issues of what sort of person ought to be allowed to compete against what other sort of person in sports. Issues of how to deal with gender dysphoria. Whether gender dysphoria is something treatable by psychologists and psychiatrists, as opposed to something which is just so permanent that we should accept it as fact. These are very thorny issues, and I must say that as somebody who's hosting a language podcast, it's quite impossible for me to sound off with opinions about those sorts of things. All of it is very new to me, and I'm working it out.But I would say this: I don't quite understand the argument that teaching people to use “they” in the new, new way must necessarily mean that you're opening the door to unconsidered approaches to all of these other things. And you know what it sounds to me like? It sounds like someone saying, don't teach slavery or racism in schools at all, because that could lead to people using the excesses of critical race theory and teaching students that if they're black, they're permanently oppressed, and if they're white, they're oppressors, and teaching students that all intellectual, artistic and moral endeavors should be about overturning power differentials and the like. I.e. the critical race theory that many people (and in my opinion, if I may give one, they are correct), are so worried about. Well, how about this? Teaching slavery and racism could under some circumstances be used as a gateway drug to teaching people that they live in hell when they're seven or eight years old, but notice how rash the argument sounds. Would that happen enough? Or is teaching slavery and racism important in other ways such that you could at least try that and just hope and maybe even work, depending on how societal consensus falls, to keep the excesses from following in their wake? To me, that's what's going on here. So, the new, new “they” does not mean that we're making decisions about how to handle gender dysphoria and what parents should allow their children to do to themselves and at what age. In general, I think, and I've sometimes considered writing a book about this and then realized nobody would read it, but it's a major issue. The slippery slope argument, in my opinion, is over applied and I just don't see it with these pronouns. Societal change happens via compromise, slowly and with a lot of fighting, but it happens via compromise. And I see “they” as a kind of progress that could happen without opening the gates to things that truly disturb and even appall other people. Society has to decide, but things happen slowly, and I think that the pronoun could happen even theoretically without any of the rest of it happening, depending on how society ends up falling on those questions.You know, it's about change and endless change can feel disorienting. I know I'm supposed to say at this point that things are changing in our society faster than ever. But do you notice that people are generally saying that about American society at all times? And I'm not sure that it's ever not been true in my lifetime. But still, things are always changing, and it's disorienting. It's like buildings being constantly torn down and being thrown back up. It's like that happening in Manhattan. You could write a song about it. Irving Berlin did write a song about it. It was for the musical Face the Music in the Depression in 1931. It was called “Manhattan Madness.” I'm not sure why “Manhattan Madness” isn't sung more than it is, because it really is a great little song, and frankly, New York is still exactly like this 90 years later. So much has changed, but it's still all about things constantly being torn down and put back up, and you never quite know where you are.Manhattan MadnessThere's a bonus to this episode. To get the bonus you have to actually sign up and pay something at BooksmartStudios.org. And what's in the bonus is actually my opinions about the latest Native American archeological findings and their implications for language. Now, I started to put that as kind of a coda to this episode, but I think that’d be a little tone deaf. The new, new “they” issues are rather emotional for many. I can't then all of a sudden just do a hairpin turn. So you get it as a bonus, but you won't know what I think about language and the latest findings about Native Americans and where they were and when unless you actually join up with BooksmartStudios.org. But you know there's somebody who gets a free bonus, and that is Becky Luskin. Becky Luskin, it is your 40th birthday and your husband has asked me to let you know that I know it here. And so, yes, you and I are both turning 40 this year, except I'm 56 on October 6th. But happy birthday to you, Becky. This is your day and not mine, or I presume that it was rather recently.In any case, if you'd like to leave a comment or check out our other great podcasts, Banished and Bully Pulpit, or subscribe, please visit BooksmartStudios.org. Our producers are Matthew Schwartz and, as always, Mike Vuolo. That catchy theme music was created by Harvest Creative Services. Those sister podcasts, again, are Banished with Amna Khalid and Bully Pulpit with Bob Garfield, and this podcast is Lexicon Valley. And I am John McWhorter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lexiconvalley.substack.com