The great he-she-it-they-them-their controversy. Pray for the republic of letters. They are coming for you, us, who knows what else. It's the great pronoun war.

Do not even hint at being confused, THEY will get you in the end!!!

What’s missing from this picture?

A person receiving THEIR first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in Los Angeles on April 9, 2021. Findings from a new study highlight the substantial impact of the U.S. vaccination program on reducing infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

The other person, that’s who!

It was happening already in 2013.

To most people, pronouns are an inoffensive combination of letters used to convey meaning. “He” went to the store. “She” read a book. The latest cause celebre among professional umbrage takers is the oppressive pronoun.

On college campuses from the San Francisco Bay area to the Bay State of Massachusetts, reports the Associated Press, a tiny but vocal gaggle of student activists is waging grammatical war on he, she, him and her.

For instance,

At Mills College in Oakland, Calif., the weekly meetings of a group for homosexual, bisexual and transgender students called “Mouthing Off” begin with a variation on the introductions at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead of “Hi, I’m Bruce, and I’m an alcoholic,” it goes something like “Hi, I’m Skylar, and my preferred pronoun is ‘they,’” as though “they” were singular.

Weird, eh?

That would be Skylar Crownover, 19, the group’s noun-verb-agreement-challenged president, who despite attending the women-only Mills College identifies as “genderqueer,” neither male nor female but rather residing in some androgynous in-between. Other “Mouthing Off” members use highly contrived preferred-gender pronouns such as “ze,” “sie,” “e,” “ou” or “ve.”

Ten years ago, remember, in cutting-edge institutions.

There had been a harbinger.

This linguistic lunacy is the illogical follow-on to “womyn,” which lesbian feminists coined years ago to take the “-men” out of “women.”

Good idea!

Meanwhile, Hampshire College, an experimental institution that opened in 1970, was listing preferred pronouns on its website, in the cause of “self-expression and self-identification” in the expectation “that all members of our community will let people self-identify their gender and gender pronouns they use to describe themselves.”

“Mainstream acceptance,” however, if still a consummation devoutly wished, was not yet consummated, AP observed, “despite the best efforts of activists.”

That was then. Eight years later, New Criterion visited the subject.

The pronoun wars have been raging around us for at least five or six years now. Like so many toxic developments, this sickness was incubated in the university.

So it was.

Back in 2018, we had occasion to note how the pronoun wars had infected Williams College, always a reliable litmus paper for academic fatuousness [love it], and since then the practice of people “declaring” their pronouns and making up ever more extravagant alternatives for the usual vocables (he, his, she, hers, etc.) has spread far and wide.

It had become the thing.

A couple years ago, the metastasis looked complete, with employees at many businesses—especially “soft” ones like publishing and anything to do with the arts, media, or education—routinely including their “preferred” pronouns in the signature block of their correspondence.

And with these on board, could gummint be far behind?

The nadir came when the Biden administration added a menu of pronoun choices to the White House website and announced that government employees would be encouraged to pick their own pronouns. Earlier this autumn, the State Department issued an enthusiastic tweet about a glorious new holiday: “International Pronouns Day.”

And what are we to make of that? Except that you can tell a person’s wokeness by the pronouns he or she chooses.