Trigger Warning

In the immortal words of the 1970s prog-rock band, Emerson, Lake and Palmer: Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. Those among you who survived the things that you were doing to your brains at that time may recall some of the other lyrics. Lyrics which are currently unsuitable for publication due to the changes in social acceptability that have transpired in the fifty years between then, and now.

But, as I am wont to do, I digress.

The purpose of this first-in-a-while entry into The Blog is to refresh your memories about what The Blog is, and isn’t, and some of the ground rules that will, hopefully, enable you to participate in The Blog – as a reader, commenter, or correspondent – without being offended all the time. About which more anon.

First and foremost, I write The Blog as a hopefully entertaining five- or ten-minute break in your endless doomscrolling of Tik-Tok and/or YouTube Shorts to give your brain a chance to exercise its evolutionarily determined (or Cosmic Muffin designed, if you swing that way) fitness for taking a literary narrative and automatically turning it into pictures in your head. 

Second, The Blog gives me a place to practice my craft as a writer and use such words as “anon” in grammatically complete sentences just to keep the blush on the rose, as it were. I need the practice because once again, and against better advice, I’m delving into long-form, humorous fiction with the next Juice Verrone novel. Code named Requiem, I’ll be posting teasers up there and down there as it develops.

Third, we have reached anon. Humor is not a victimless crime. There is always a butt of the joke. The only thing that Gentle Humor has going for it is: it’s not funny. I, in The Blog, at least, usually try to point the bright light of absurdity at myself because, being lazy, low hanging fruit is the sweetest. But I will point it elsewhere as needed.

The reason behind this is that characters are one of those things that fiction kind of requires and characters must be believable. This means that I have to write things that I myself may or may not believe and I have to do so convincingly enough that you might get offended; but at the character, not me. Hell, I should be good enough to offend even myself. But, skipping four paragraphs back to remind you how we started, I can’t afford to offend everybody all the time or the whole readership thing tends to hit the skids.

But I can afford to offend everybody once or twice. It just behooves me to have the offensive characters offend different groups with different triggers so that not everybody is pissed off all at the same time.

As an example. In one of the reviews that a reader left for Fresh Squeezed she (it was obvious, trust me) was discomfited by the association Bonnie Biafore and I wrote between a character’s career choice and that character’s merely human foibles. They – the reviewer – concluded that they – the character – would never, ever, never, never be that type of person in that type of career. She was adamant. My – unwritten – reply to them was: “Bullshit”. Any personality can be found in any career because they are human and subject to everything that being human entails. I do have to be careful when writing non-human characters though. Different rules.

In short remember, and please revisit my Old Blog post Truth be Told for the full explanation, in The Blog things that may seem too anything to be true, may in fact be entirely accurate, Other things, so completely believable that you would bet money on it, may in fact be the invention of my hyperactive imagination. Now, take those two endpoints and smear a wide, gray line connecting them. I just can’t be trusted.

My writing career can be divided into three parts, blog-wise. The Old Blog covers the period of The Great Transition from 2010 to 2013. The Great Hiatus is the Dark Age from the end of 2013 until now. While the Great Hiatus may be blog-free, it is not story-free so I will be dipping my ladle into that pot from time to time to serve up something that might appear to be fresh, but isn’t. And now, we’re back into The Blog, which will continue until its purpose – whatever that might be – is served. 

One thing that surprised me during the eleven-year chunk of my wasted life that is The Great Hiatus is how so many things have changed. Not new/different/better kind of changes, but changes in context. Just a few – geologically speaking – years ago “wokeness” was something you aspired to. It was something that someone could use to demonstrate their awareness of the nuances and complexities of the human condition. It was a way to rise above the societal divides that carve us into self-reflective camps and see that those other camps, while maybe different from the outside, really share many of the same values that are precious within our own camp.

But not anymore. Being “woke” is now an aspersion cast upon your assumed virtue signaling that everybody gets to identify as whomever he, she, or they want to. Regardless. Now, don’t get me wrong, everybody has the right to be whatever, however, or wherever (but get a room, c’mon, really). Whether you are an icy hermit engrottoed on a mountain peak or a polyamorous confab that requires several sets of parentheses and a handful of exponents to accurately define, that’s great. You do you and I wish you all possible happiness.

Until we get to grammar. In grammar, pick a lane. Please.

Of course, I’m talking about pronouns. Not all pronouns. Only the use of “they” and it’s various constructs, as the third person singular. Hear me out for a minute. The use of “they” in English as a third person singular has a deep history going back several centuries. The use in the singular stems from its use in the plural to refer to any group of people. As the singular it replaces the more awkward – and lengthy – “he or she” to refer to an individual. It is the perfect way to reference an individual when that individual’s true identity may be indeterminant. But, in the New World Order, they want “they” to refer to a specific individual. I’m not buying it.

It’s like what happened to rainbows. I like rainbows. In fact, I like them so much that I used to have a discrete rainbow sticker on my car. When I saw it, I would be reminded of how happy seeing a rainbow made me feel. Not. Any. More. Now that same sticker would be a statement. A call to arms. My car would get keyed outside the western wear store when I went in for a new pair of Carhartts. So something that brought me joy was stolen from me. And I’ll never get it back. It’s the same with “They”

Fortunately, English is a particularly malleable language. So much so that none of you noticed that the “engrotto” vt. used on our lonely hermit four paragraphs up is not an actual word at all. Despite that being the case, all of you instantly knew what it meant. Instantly. However, it’s a big leap from using a word and having that word become part of the language. That leap requires somebody else to pick up the torch from the floor of the cave and run with it.

Thus it is with “they”. There are any number (eight with five constructs each in the most complete list I found) of proposed pronouns for the inclusively inclined but all of them – every last one – are third person singular. This is important because third person singular is not you referring to yourself. It’s not me referring to you when we’re face to face. These pronouns are what you want me to use to refer to you to somebody else even when you’re not there. And what do we do when you change your mind. There needs to be conference where a single, new set of third person pronouns is agreed to by people who want a gender indeterminate way of talking about people who aren’t even present. Sadly, at this point, the torch remains sputtering on the floor.

But consider yourself lucky that this little dustup is happening in English. Where there’s hope of making the change. In the romance languages – French, Spanish, etc. – you or rather they are constrained to a gender. Full. Stop. If you want to use “they”, you better be sure there’s more than one of you. Any uncertainty is handled by tossing you in with the guys. Admittedly, there have been some attempts to make this work for other languages but so far, bupkis. French? That’s never going to happen.

I think the way to go is the way that it’s handled in the Thai language. There are only two second person singular pronouns – one for day-to-day use and one for very familiar use. Neither implies gender. There is only one third person singular pronoun. Again, genderless. But, first person singular? How you refer to yourself? There are two.

Pick a lane.

Now, hopefully some of you – but not all of you – are offended. Hopefully, all of you got to think about something in maybe a different way than you had before. All of you should be uncertain as to where this particular jeremiad originated. Is it what I think?  Am I channeling a character I have in mind and giving them (ha, ha, ha) a chance to find their voice. You’re just going to have to figure that out on your own.

Because I’m not telling.