Pronoun trouble The story of us in seven little words

This piquant study from McWhorter (Woke Racism), a linguistics professor at Columbia University, explores the twisty history of pronouns. Tracing the etymology of each, McWhorter details, for instance, how the word eg, from the ancient Proto-Indo-European progenitor of most European languages, evolved into I in English, ik in Dutch, and yo in Spanish. English once had several second-person pronouns (thou, thee, ye, you) to distinguish singular/plural and subject/object uses, McWhorter notes, recounting how the imposition of English on Celtic peoples and the arrival of Scandinavian invaders in Britain in the centuries prior to the 1066 Norman invasion kickstarted a gradual simplification process during which large numbers of people learning English as a second language struggled to keep up with such distinctions and settled on only using you. McWhorter defends the use of they to refer to gender nonbinary individuals, pointing out that authors as old as Geoffrey Chaucer used they as a singular pronoun, and arguing that it's futile to resist language's ever-evolving mutations. The etymology fascinates, and light humor enlivens what might in lesser hands become stuffy ("What's with I and me? While he and him are clearly siblings, me seems brought in from somewhere else, like a sibling from Dad's first marriage"). Word nerds will find much to ponder. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House. (Apr.)

They for a singular person? Says the eminent linguist: Why not? He's been branded a conservative, but McWhorter, who doesn't avow the label, is no William Safire. Instead, in this pointed treatise, McWhorter considers the pronouns we use as both historical and ever-changing things, resisting conservatism, linguistic and otherwise: "I am a great fan of the new usage ofthey, and think it is a very sad thing that we are taught that it is a form of mental debility to useme and other object pronouns as subjects." He's not alone: McWhorter enlists a phalanx of English writers to back him up in various usages that became canonically disapproved only when the proto--grammar police set up shop back in Georgian times. Shakespeare, he notes, failed upward by using "Between you and I" inThe Merchant of Venice, anticipating a matter that's still of confusion: WhenI, and whenme? McWhorter traces the sources of confusion all the way back to the evolution of our pronouns in Old English and even earlier: the olduncer, forour, widespread in English, turns up in supposedly unlettered dialects asyou-uns, and as fory'all andyouse, those are laudable--well, at least not condemnable--survivals of the old dual form in English, which distinguished the singularyou (once marked bythou) and the plural, used to address both more than one person and the presumedly socially superior among us. "Really--if English were normal, we would be walking around with our flip-flops and iPhones and Drake and whole-grain pasta calling each otherthou," McWhorter writes. "It would beyou that felt increasingly antique." McWhorter gets deep into the weeds, and it helps to know a little about historical linguistics, but it's not required. Fun and instructive--and thou mayest emerge spakingthey for that single person standing next to you. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.