When schools give up teaching literacy --

What can we do but stutter and stammer

faced with the overthrow of grammar?

The ivory tower, once well-gated,

is stormed by speech un-articulated,

and Stations of the Cross-out by editor's pen

may never be seen on a page again.

To decipher a sentence is an exercise gnostic

when meaning's as cryptic as initials acrostic.

Antonyms and acronyms make poor kin and kith

and prepositions know not when they're at, to or with.

Ironically, "texting" is the graveyard of text,

while literary stylists ask: what will die next?

The Pandemic of Logo-phobia

Is logo-phobia yet another new mental illness? Fearing, perhaps, to offend "persons of colour", are we becoming persons of colourless speech?

We fear words themselves -- pronouns, obviously -- but why are we anti-noun? We hate them so much we turn them into verbs -- always "efforting" and "expensing", "authoring" and "evidencing" -- even though misuse of the suffix "ing" does not a verb make. 

And who knew how malevolent a lowly preposition could be? Ask someone "where are you from?" and you could be labelled a right-wing anti-immigrant bigot. A polite conversational enquiry is attacked by the Language Police.

Remember when parents advised kids to "ask others about themselves, don't just talk about yourself"? Who knows what's polite now -- what's proper etiquette? "Etiquette" comes from the French word for "ticket". No one knows what our ticket out of Language Jail might be; no wonder we fear words. They're unexploded bombs: choose the wrong one and you can be blasted right off your platform.

In fear of the Language Police we call everybody persons-experiencing-things, rather than persons being things, i.e. noun-things with names, like "addict" for instance, rather than a person-experiencing-addiction. A shop-lifter, presumably, is a person-experiencing-kleptomania (and may be called a person-experiencing-marginalization-and-underprivilege, by persons-acting-diverse-and-inclusive).

 

So am I un-empathetically linking language with moral responsibility? Yup. (Sorry.) So avoiding clear language means avoiding moral responsibility? (A non-correct question if ever there was one. Our apologies.) 

Nothing's your fault if your pronoun is "they/them" -- it's theirs. Maybe avoiding being the Subject and hiding behind Object-hood is a survival strategy, but this refusal to let the ball of responsibility and fluency land in your court is causing certain others to experience depression -- and mystification. Why do we fear words, and fear meaning what words mean? Do we fear giving offense, or are we simply persons-experiencing-mass-censorship?

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Woe Is They: Pronouns in the Satirocene Age

Woe Is They

       To the ever-growing list of mental ailments the contemporary mind is heir to, we can add Pronominal Phobia. This disability means that those who selves-identify as non-binary fear non-plurality of pronouns, thinking the old-fashioned grammatical ones unsafe. It's hard to address these “two-spirit” persons however, for like Schrodinger's cat they might jump either way mid-communication, declining to be pinned down to any linguistic spot they feel you might be inequitably consigning them to.

        "Oh let myselves not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven," they might cry like King Lear.

       So good-hearted inclusionists, fearing to use the wrong pro-noun about anymany, will chase after whatever handy non-nouns they can invent in a desperate attempt to anti-name the world in pursuit of equity. We must do this because we can't expect any everymany who declines binary-ness to feel unsafe just because we want to be comprehensible.

       You can't ask non-binary persons themselves about this in case it triggers their Pronominal Phobia. That much is clear to everysome, for it depends on how a person feels themself. But why, to themself, does this they-ness feel safer? It's a mystery. Don't ask me (sic). We don't know – we only know that in the face of singularity, woe is us -- and woe is they. Speaking for ourself (all my me's) we feel safest therefore inside the shelter of silence – thou too?