Does anyone else share my very particular pet peeve?
For several years now, I’ve regularly experienced a trend that makes my skin crawl.
No, it’s not fingernails on the chalkboard. And by the way, if you’re rarely in a classroom, you might not know that blackboards are passé. These days, various versions of marker boards most often adorn schoolhouse walls, whether they’re made of cheap white masonite that’s better suited to apartment bathroom showers or the real deal, magnetic steel. That hellish screeching is not as frequent an irritant as it used to be.
No, my pet peeve is a specific use of language that rubs me the wrong way.
Now, before you say “Sheesh” and stop reading, hear me out. I know you’ve experienced it, too. It’s everywhere!
What bugs me BIGTIME is the use of first-person plural for second-person plural.
If I lost you there, it’s this: saying WE instead of YOU (plural— like y’all), as in the following typical exchange.
SERVER
(walking up to our table)
What are WE having to drink today?
ME
(embarrassing everyone at our table)
Well, I don’t know what YOU’RE having, but I’M drinking unsweetened iced tea.
But it’s not just at restaurants. It happens in all kinds of service industries. The HGTV host questions the house hunters, “What are we in the market for?” The cashier at the hobby shop makes small talk, asking, “What are we making today?” The librarian inquires, “What are we reading these days?” As if any one of them is going to help purchase, craft, or read with me.
It’s then that my insides start twisting, and I can’t keep my mouth closed. I blurt out my usual reply, “I don’t know what YOU’RE…, but I’M….” while my friends and family suddenly find something far away from me that requires their immediate attention. It’s becoming a well-worn scenario in my world.
I knew there had to be a reason this phrasing was taking the world by storm.
A few years ago, in a first-person, singular grass-roots effort to correct this developing shift in spoken English, I complimented a server who used the correct person and number for her pronoun in her introductory question. She was a bit surprised by my praise, but she agreed with me. “Yeah, it bugs me when servers use ‘we,’” she admitted. “I know it’s not correct, but we’re supposed to use it.” She leaned over closer. “It makes it sound like we’re more of a team.”
Ahhh… This was a young person after my own heart! She not only recognized the inaccuracy of the pronoun usage, but also disdained it, even though it IS an example of rhetoric in the real world. Perhaps she had a promising future as an English teacher! I suggested a possible change in career to her, but she politely demurred.
Now that she’d confirmed my suspicions, I wasn’t about to be lured into an upsell to larger fries or dessert by a marketing trick, especially an ungrammatical one. Rest assured. She did get a larger tip for being grammatically correct.
So are YOU with me on this pet peeve? Are WE on the same team? (Notice how I used the pronouns correctly because I was addressing the group initially, but later addressed the notion that we could be on the same team, albeit metaphorically.)
My friends aren’t. While they initially appreciated my loyalty to Daily Grammar Practice, now they roll their eyes in a futile attempt to get me to give up the crusade. I’m sure it’s getting tiresome for them.
There is some hope for their rejoining my team, though. A friend texted me recently saying that she thought of me when she heard a Boeing scientist on Earth talking to the press about the astronauts stuck in space. “We’re not stuck,” he asserted. Easy for him to say with his feet on terra firma!
Recently, I’ve noted that this team-oriented euphemism designed to sway others has stretched beyond pronouns. Many elementary classrooms today don’t have teachers and students. Instead, they are filled with “friends” that generally include a much taller and better-educated one who uses the largest desk in the room.
How and why did that happen? I can’t help but wonder if that shift in language has any bearing on the lack of respect that teachers deal with daily. Words do make an impact.
But that’s another topic.
I concede that English is an ever-evolving language, with rules subject to context. I preached that to my students who frequently challenged me about vocabulary and usage. I get it. And you might think that after writing a historical novel about Quakers and substituting “thee” for “you” singular over the past year and ignoring the accepted norm for subject-verb agreement rules, I’d be over such pedantic peccadilloes.
But I’m not.
I guess we’ll be working on it.
