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 McWhorter at a dinner party.”—Malcolm Gladwell
 
“Yes, Pronoun Trouble sheds light on using ‘they’ for a single person, ‘guys’ for girls and women, and the self-contradictory but ubiquitous ‘yeah no.’ But more than that, you come away knowing how the language you love—or take for granted—got that way.”—Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don’t Understand
 
“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? No one could make better sense of this part of speech than our national treasure, John McWhorter. Pronoun Trouble explains its subject with clarity, insight, and good judgment.”—Steven Pinker (he/him/his), author of The Language Instinct

“John McWhorter takes a small-seeming subject, the pronoun, 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 that they miss his larger point: 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