Pronoun Police

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

― John Fowles

Goodly readers on occasion complain that my old-school use of pronouns and impatience with pronouns of choice reveal insensitivity and bias.

Under the hot lights of these pronoun police, I'll admit, I'd probably cop a plea.

But for the moment suffice it to say my one true bias is a bias for brevity.

Brevity speeds communication; and life's too short to stuff a mushroom.

But, incisive as it is, brevity almost always ruffles feathers. 

By fostering favoritism, brevity can't help but trigger the aggrieved.

• Men at work. 
• Boys will be boys. 
• Drama queen.
• All men are created equal.

We could easily enough scrub favoritism from these phrases, but what value would we really add?

• Proletariats laboring up ahead.
• Youths will behave as they frequently do.
• Histrionic person.
• All human beings either are created equal or turn out that way due to randomized instances of syngamy.

I wish I could be as cheery about our current obsession with wokish circumlocution as the linguist John McWhorter, who recently applauded this sentence:

• The boy wants to see a picture of herself.

"There are times when the language firmament shifts under people’s feet," he wrote in The New York Times. "They get through it."

And if they don't, the pronoun police will be there to assist.