McWhorter

• wiki.keithl.com/McWhorter

John McWhorter books

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWhorter

  • b 1965, PhD Stanford 1993
  • taught linguistics at Cornell 1993-1995 and UC Berkeley 1995-2003
  • Manhattan Institute 2003-
  • Columbia University 2008-

Pronoun Trouble . 2025 BvtLib 425.55 MCW . 216 pages

The Story of Us in Seven Little Words

• I tried to read this book; if I was a language maven and had an "ear" for English as sound rather than printed words on a page, I would have learned far more from it.
• The overall message is that spoken languages evolve continuously, new words replace old, old words are modified, pronunciation changes
• over time, pronouns change, grammar changes, older and younger and second-language speakers use different pronouns, and what we talk about changes

• The book does NOT explicitly list "seven little words", but the core personal pronouns of English are "I, you, he, she, it we, they" ... (him, her, them

• p6 agita a feeling of agitation or anxiety

• p12 amn't "am not "in Scotland and Ireland

• p13 bowsy Obsolete spelling of boozy

• p21 Proto Indo-European (PIE) language 4500-2500 BC

• p27 Twilight Zone Five Characters in Search of an Exit

• p27 me versus I: "I (subject pronoun) did it" or "me" (object pronoun) if single word used alone

• p36 Latin as model for the(snob) standardization of English

• p45 linguistic agreement a word changes form depending on the other words it relates to.

• p48 Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are mutually understandable dialects of same language
  • "language is a political definition, dialect is a linguistic definition"

• p55 Ye is a misreading of "thorn" letter þ

  • God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen Ye=You, or Thee

• p56 English inc meant "you two"

• p57 origin of language hundreds of thousands to two million years ago

• p57 Marie Kondo Japanese Organizing Consultant

• p60 "status blind" use of Middle English pronouns was a grievous insult

  • Shakespeare signified the social status of characters by their pronouns; Othello uses "thou" for underling Iago, Iago uses "you" for boss Othello. Quakers/Friends used "thou" for everyone in that sense.

• p96 dual pronouns, two, between one and many

• .. and about here I ran out of energy and attention for this book.