This isn’t just 1984; this is 1984 on steroids. Michigan House Democrats passed House Bill 4474 with expanded protections under its previous Ethnic Intimidation Act. You know where this is going. Apparently, they don’t.
I hope this is fake news. Lord, make it fake news, please. Let’s just pretend it is if it isn’t.
According to a couple of online sources (Please, Lord, make it fake news), Michigan’s Democrats want to make using the “wrong pronoun” a punishable offense. Yeah. Prison and a fine. And a FELONY!
Education in Olden Days
Using the wrong pronoun has always been a problem for English teachers. Many students use plural pronouns with singular antecedents. The grammar error has been with us for generations; it’s a problem for sure and one punishable with a lower grade and some extensive red marginalia written late at night by a frustrated teacher sitting at a table piled high with uncorrected compositions. “His!” NOT “their.” “Their!” NOT “There.” And as the night turns to early morning and increasing frustration, the fatigued corrector writes, “NUMBER DISAGREEMENT: If the antecedent is singular, the pronoun has to be singular.” That’s probably followed by some rather large exclamation points with the last one ripping the paper: !!!!!!!!!
Now imagine the marginalia centered on Standard Formal English after the Michigan Senate and Governor Whitmer sign HB 4474 into law. “That’s it. I’m calling 911.” Some future English teacher will write 911 in red ink, send the kid to the office, and actually call the police. “I felt threatened when I read that.”
Please, Lord, tell me it is fake news. Send me a sign with personal pronouns declined by person and number:
Nominative Case
Singular Plural
I we
you you
he, she, it they
Objective Case
Singular Plural
me us
you you
him, her, it them
Possessive Case
Singular Plural
my, mine our, ours
your, yours your, yours
his, her, hers, its their, theirs
Unintended Consequences: The Bane of Every Liberal Attempt to Impose Equity as a Mechanism of Unity
In their effort to “protect” Michiganders from hearing speech they find offensive, the legislators have complicated their justice system in ways they seemingly can’t foresee. I’ll come back to that.
How wimpy have we become as a nation? What happened to the childhood singsong “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me”? Holy Cow! How psychologically weak have we become? And Holy Cow! Am I allowed to “appropriate” a part of Jewish tradition by referring to the golden calf that infuriated Moses when he descended the mountain? Is this one of those punishable offenses covered by HB 4474? I did say it intentionally, and intention is one of the requisite conditions in the bill—if it is a real bill and not a prank. Please, Lord, let it be a prank.
Back to the complications imposed on the justice system. Will there be 911 calls based on someone’s hearing some nasty children shout “He, He, He” in the presence of a human who identifies as “they”? Isn’t hehehe much like hahaha. What if the offended one has misinterpreted unrelated laughter as a slur? Children—like many adults—don’t always consider the potential consequences of their actions, as Americans found out when elementary schools made drawings of pistols and fingers pointed like guns punishable by expulsion. And what if one of those sixth-grade children, having paid attention in English class, has a brain trained in Standard Formal English, a brain that balks at using a plural pronoun for a singular antecedent?
What of the potential confusion that the new pronouns might create? Looking for members of the family who might be missing? Well, “Sheila says they are going to the mall.” Is Sheila “they”? Are the family members at the mall? And what happens to the plural pronouns? Do we strike them from the language? Except, of course, for Sheila’s preferred pronoun that only she knows when she is at the marketplace, where a clerk and stranger might use the singular feminine personal pronouns: “I think we have those in the back. Just a minute, I’ll call the storeroom. Charley, I’m out front. A girl just asked for one of those Lulu Lemon tops in pink. Can you see if we have one for HER? SHE also says SHE’LL take one in blue.”
Quick! Call die Notrufnummer
But if language is a problem, then why not include any word in any form as a punishable offense? The absurdities HB 4474 can engender will outnumber the seemingly unlimited number of genders some believe exist, which is ironic among English language speakers that dropped noun-class gender in a split from Frisian, Anglo-Saxon, and German (Think Deutsch die, der, and das and English’s genderless the and a). What if a Michigander overhears someone speak in one of the languages that retain gender in nouns, articles, and pronouns. Should the person take offense? A survey of just 256 of 7,000 languages found 46% had noun-class gender. ** Take German (Deutsch) as an example, where words ending in ung, schaft, ion, heit, keit, tät, and ik (like die Musik) are all “feminine.”
Not even AI will be able to keep up as this group or that group decides willy-nilly what is offensive by virtue of being associated with gender either grammatical or sexual. Goodbye, First Amendment. Goodbye, intelligible English. And definitely, goodbye, Standard Formal English. The new law (Please, Lord, say it isn’t true) will divide more than unify.
Of course, we have already abandoned Standard Formal English with “he don’t,” “she don’t,” and “they don’t” commonly heard in the vernacular. Plurals? Well, consider “Fifty Cent.” And since languages constantly evolve—you do not speak Anglo-Saxon, Frisian, Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s English—then this push to break with traditional “number agreement” between antecedent and pronoun will possibly produce a new Standard. If that happens, then we can acknowledge Governor Whitmer and the Michigan Democrats as the originators of New English.
Attempting inclusivity, We’ve Already Over-complicated the Language
In the 1990s with two co-authors on college texts and government research, I encountered publishers and agency officials who required numerous revisions of Standard Formal English lest the use of he offended someone. That led to a number of sentences with “he and she” or even, in government documents to “he/she” and to the use of she to replace what had been the universal use of the masculine as in “Everyone should take his book to the class” when both males and females are involved. Now, at the very least, people write “Everyone should take his or her book to the class,” or in grammatical number disagreement between pronoun and antecedent, “Everyone (a singular) should take their (a plural) book(s) to the class.”
But let’s run HB 4474 to its conclusion by noting words whose use should be punishable under future amendments:
1. Big: This word offends those with a BMI over 30.
2. Small: This word offends people who don’t reach a population’s average height.
3. Fat: See #1
4. Lefty (not the political meaning): My late father (born in 1916), predominantly left-handed, told me that when he was in elementary school, his teacher tied his left hand behind his back to make him write with his right hand. Ultimately, it probably helped him to become ambidextrous. Imagine what that teacher might have done to someone using a “preferred pronoun.”
5. Old people: I’m one, and I don’t care. But if there were a law against using the term on the grounds of discrimination against the aged that carried imprisonment and a fine, I would still use the term and risk the legal consequences in defiance. Hey, I can argue, “I’m old; I didn’t remember. Where are my glasses? Where am I?”
The Actual HB 4474
Here are some lines from HR 4474 as posted online:
11 (9) As used in this section:
12 (a) "Gender identity or expression" means having or being
13 perceived as having a gender-related self-identity or expression
14 whether or not associated with an individual's assigned sex at
15 birth.
16 (b) "Intimidate" means a willful course of conduct involving
17 repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would
18 cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, or
19 threatened, and that actually causes the victim to feel terrorized,
20 frightened, or threatened. Intimidate does not include
21 constitutionally protected activity or conduct that serves a
22 legitimate purpose. *
Let the legal wrangling begin. This one’s probably going to the Supreme Court probably after some very liberal school board or D.A. punishes a kid for disrespect. Fortunately for Michiganders, these legislators have focused on the most serious issue that Michiganders face today: Pronouns. Crime in Detroit? Not as important.
May each of those legislators be caught on camera using him, her, it in a moment of inappropriate pronoun-ing. But then, maybe those legislators say, “It don’t,” “Everyone went to their house,” and a sundry other non-Standard English expressions because they, him, them never paid attention in English class and each of they, him, her, it never read the red ink in the margins of their, him’s, herses corrected papers.
*https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2023-2024/billengrossed/House/pdf/2023-HEBH-4474.pdf
**Article included in Vanhove, Martine; Stolz, Thomas; Urdze, Aina; Otsuka, Hitomi, eds. (2012). Morphologies in Contact. Berlin: Akademie Verlag Berlin. p. 97. doi:10.1524/9783050057699. ISBN 978-3050057019.
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