The Brunch Table

Precious.

Marlies found the most remarkable item on YouTube today. At first I thought it was another fan translation…but it turned out to be something much more ambitious:

(direct link)

So in the one linguistics class I took in college, I learned that changes in the way we use language can be “prescriptive” (spreading from authorities out to the general public) or “descriptive” (vice-versa, when some creeping nonstandard thing that ordinary people do eventually becomes the right way to do it).

Over the past few decades, we’ve seen some prescriptive attempts at introducing gender-neutral pronouns, most commonly some variation on “he-or-she.” But as Wikipedia relates, these constructions haven’t fared too well:

…these well-intended suggestions have been largely ignored by the general English-speaking public, and the project to supplement the English pronoun system has proved to be an ongoing exercise in futility. Pronouns are one of the most basic components of a language, and most speakers appear to have little interest in adopting invented ones.

However, despite the lack of an official solution, the desire to ditch the old usage endured. Soon enough, an elegant descriptive alternative began to spread through the language–perhaps some future scholar can work out exactly when it started. It’s not enshrined in any style guide I know, and it’s still considered nonstandard in print, but I’ve heard it in ordinary speech all my life. And today, I noticed this:

As Facebook goes, so goes the English-speaking world, I’ll wager.

(Klootzak = jerk, asshole; lit. scrotum)