Pronouns without antecedents ruin everything.

I’m looking at you, They.

I have been married for 44 years to an identical twin, which causes a serious communication problem. Not between the twins—oh, no, just the opposite—but between my wife and me. On days when Dorothy works remotely at her fundraising job, I overhear a professional who speaks with precision and lucidity. But when she talks to me, she speaks as if I were her telepathic twin. I find myself mentally chasing after lost antecedents in a vain search for the meaning of every long, pronoun-populated sentence.

He told me they’re taking it down off the mountain and he said they claim there’s money to replace the whole thing, and when I saw her yesterday she said they’ll use a helicopter and they may want to put it down on our meadow until they can come and pick it up with trucks.

While she’s speaking, I’m trying to remember if she mentioned the identity of that first he. “They” probably are state authorities or workers, and the only “it” on our mountain’s summit is a fire tower. But by the time I register workers and fire tower, suddenly “she” shows up in the plot and a chopper is putting something — pieces of the tower? — down on our meadow.

This “conversation” actually took place, though since Dorothy reads these posts, I will admit to having inserted more orphan pronouns than she probably did. When she speaks to me like this, I tend to screw up my face in what looks like an angry expression, when really it’s just an unconscious reflection of extreme mental effort. Then Dorothy gets upset and I apologize, wondering what exactly will land on our meadow.

Why does she talk this way to me, when she’s a model of clarity to her colleagues and donors? I believe it’s because she loves me. She feels as close to me as she does to her sister Jane (who, by the way, speaks to me in perfect sentences).

Dorothy and Jane use their own twinspeak dialect with each other, and it can get downright eerie at times. Years ago, I came home from work and told Dorothy a joke. It went like this (warning: it's tasteless, makes fun of agriculture majors, and a dog tragically dies):

Two Aggies—students at a fine agricultural college—are driving down a country road in their pickup when suddenly a dog darts ahead of them and they hit it. The animal is now an ex-dog. Feeling terrible, the aggies walk up to the one house they see and knock on the door. A woman answers.

“We’re sorry, Ma’am,” the first Aggie says. “But we think we killed your dog.”

“What did it look like?” she asks.

The Aggie closes his eyes and sticks his tongue out, playing roadkill.

“No, no! I mean, what did it look like before you killed it?”

The second Aggie raises his two paws with a look of horror.

Oh, geez. It now occurs to me as I write in the pre-dawn on just one cup of coffee that this joke only works if you can see me, and I’m definitely not doing a video.

Anyway, I told the joke to Dorothy and she said, “I want to tell Jane.” As she headed to the landline, I said, “You can’t tell that joke over the phone.” The twins lived 800 miles apart and smartphones weren’t yet a thing.

“Watch me.”

I put my ear close to the receiver as Dorothy told the joke. When she got to the point where the first Aggie closes his eyes and lolls his tongue, she held the telephone from her face and lolled her tongue. I could hear tinny laughter from the other end. Dorothy then played the horrified dog, putting her paws up while still clutching the receiver, and I could hear hysterical laughter. (Their humor inclines toward the macabre, bless their evil hearts.)

Jane swore she’d never heard that joke before, and I believe her. Since then, I’ve told this story to many people who know twins, and they agree: there’s a bit of telepathy going on. But not between twins and their confused spouses.

There’s a rhetorical moral to this story. While we’re all urged to practice empathy, clarity comes first. When you write, use pronouns sparingly. And, heck, when you speak, please practice using actual self-respecting nouns.

Obviously I’m not talking about the pronouns people wish to be called by. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge another’s pronoun is just being impolite. So is someone who witlessly announces on X that “My pronouns are AR and 15!” As an older person, however, I hope to be forgiven when someone uses “they” in a sentence and I fail to recognize it as a singular pronoun. One hopes that one shall one day devise a word that is perfectly genderless.

A far greater crime than a political argument over pronouns is political speech that deliberately banishes antecedents.

“They are eating the dogs.”

Actually, Trump’s caniphagy claim isn’t the most egregious misuse of a pronoun. He fills in the antecedent later: They are “the people that came in.” But no prominent politician living today uses “They” more than Trump. It’s easy to dehumanize humans if you leave out the nouns and adjectives that make them seem human.

In a previous post, I argued that “good” grammar is the code of the elite, which is exactly why students should learn grammar. Code switching lets us speak across the gaps of class and identity. But every teacher should crack down hard on every sentence that lacks good anchors for drifting pronouns.

And when someone uses “They” instead of “corporate CEOs” or “Haitians” or “Elon Musk” or “the Man” (but then I repeat myself), it’s beholden to all of us to insist on those antecedents. Exactly who are you talking about?

Yeah, who, not whom. I’m no grammar Nazi; but do feel free to correct me.

As for Dorothy’s pronouns, I’m learning to make my face seem calm and happy. She says I’m terrible at it; but marriage is all about trying. Hey, it is what it is.