What is this pronoun thing? Whom does it help? How does it help him or her or . . . them???

Loyola-Chicago's English dept. in the mix with the best (worst?) of them . . .

My alma mater, Loyola-Chicago, reports via its English Department about one of its own. Or two? More?

Dr. Jaime Hovey has been teaching part-time at Loyola for ten years, but last year was their [!] first as a full-time faculty member for the Writing Program.

Is the name Jaime Hovey code for a collective?

We hardly knew you (ye?), Jaime!

Now. We may ask what the hell is going on? This fellow says it nicely.

If keeping up with all these rules about which words and phrases are and are not acceptable seems disorienting, that’s by design – confusion is a feature, not a bug of the left’s new language regime.

The more you are consumed by worrying about whether or not each syllable you utter will offend someone, the more control the leftist language gatekeepers have over your speech, and by extension your thoughts.

In my humble opinion, it works that way, doesn’t it? In the ‘60s as a remedial-reading teacher at a settlement house, moving around the ‘hoods, I used the verboten term “hill-billy,” referring to Southern whites, in the presence of a Southern white! Was instantly abashed. (Rightly so, example is to demonstrate self-censoring, which is clearly enough not always a bad thing!)

One of the masters of this situation in terms of knowing the answer to that question had this to say about the bad thing we are talking about here:

George Orwell warned of just such a dystopian nightmare in his increasingly prophetic novel 1984. “The whole aim” of the political redefinition of language “is to narrow the range of thought,” he wrote. The end goal is to “make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

They came for your words of choice and you went along. They came for your pithy phrases and you said no problem. For your sentences, paragraphs, whole essays, whole books . . . etc. etc. etc.

And then they came for you!