“Yo”-mentum
Drive-by lexicologists nearly wet themselves last week as word spread from the Language Log to The Wall Street Journal about the burgeoning use of “yo” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun among Baltimore schoolchildren. Feeling on the cutting edge of urban realism—like they’d just walked off the set of The Wire or something—writers all over trumpeted this instance of ordinary street-speak naturally solving one of the English language’s intractable problems. Dialectical evolution from the ground up, they said—just as it’s supposed to be.
Hold the phone, Safire.
All the hubbub stems from a study published last fall in the American Dialect Society’s journal American Speech, which found the phenomenon limited to Baltimore schools (and, by the way, several years old). But the researchers found that “yo” wasn’t being used to replace the awkward “his/her,” “his or her” or their many clunky variations in sentences like, “Everyone finished his/her work.” Rather, the kids used it primarily as a singular subject: “Yo sucks at magic tricks.” “Yo handin’ out papers.” “Yo look like a sackass gump.”
Everyone is so eager to create a new gender-neutral singular pronoun (a few weeks ago we documented great “hu” debacle) that they ignore the perfectly workable, acceptable gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun we already have: they/their.
Anyone who claims “Everyone finished their work” is grammatically incorrect hasn’t really sweated it out—on the streets of Baltimore or anywhere else. B-more kids deserve much more credit for words like “sackass gump” than for unnecessary pronouns we don’t need anyway.
Abbas-tardization of language
Dion Nissenbaum, Jerusalem bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, blogged last week on Bush’s Mideast trip that White House transcribers clean up the president’s remarks for official publication: “I ain’t got it yet” was changed to “I haven’t got it yet” in the White House transcript, for example.
Angry Grammarian reader Matthew LeMay, however, gets Bush uncensored in The Ultimate George W. Bushisms: Bush at War (With the English Language) as a prize for coming up with the most words containing the letters “xm” in succession in last month’s contest. He found 20, at least a few of which—axman, taxman, perplexment—Bush should be intimately familiar with.
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