Pronoun Trouble

Praise

“John McWhorter starts with ‘I’ and ‘me’ and ends up circling the world, with stops along the way for Shakespeare, Sesame Street, Broadway musicals, Elmer Fudd, and a hundred other unexpected and fascinating digressions. The only thing better than reading Pronoun Trouble would be sitting next to John McWhorter at a dinner party.”
—Malcolm Gladwell

“Who would have thought a decade ago that the words inciting shame and outrage would not be slurs identified by a first consonant, or a sexual term with four letters, but the humble pronoun? That’s where we are today, and no one could make better sense of this part of speech than our national treasure, John McWhorter. As with all his commentary on language, Pronoun Trouble explains its subject with clarity, insight, and good judgment.”
—Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct

“John McWhorter takes a small-seeming subject, the pronoun, one made resonant in the past few years, and with his unique mix of charm, linguistic erudition, and common sense, explains it all to us.  Readers may be so taken with his delicate analysis of examples–his passages on ‘Ima’ and ‘Let’s’ are alone worth the price of admission–that they may miss his larger point: we make our languages far more than they make us, and a passionate pluralism of concepts and voices is as essential to a sane view of the way we speak as it is to a sane view of  the way we live.”
—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker