Reading a short informational piece the other day, I found myself getting irritated. The writer(s) had constructed a sentence using a singular noun (he) but then included a plural pronoun (they). I understand on one level. This is the world we live in now. Decades ago, when I was being taught about the English language, all the parts of the sentence needed to agree. The subjects, the verbs, the adverbs, and the pronouns… all of them in happy accord. Not so these days. Apparently, a person (singular) can self-identify (a concept we didn’t discuss decades ago) as they (plural). If that’s how she experiences themselves, so be it. If that’s how he best understands themselves, okay. If we can be pro nouns, I suppose we can find it within ourselves to celebrate a wide variety of pronouns as well.
Nouns are just so marvelous, are they not? The things we sit on and sleep in, the fur-covered living beings we feed and pet. All the pieces-parts of the world around us and the pieces-parts inside us we trust must be there hard at work around the clock because we are alive. There are nouns we drive and nouns that drive us crazy (take your pick!) and nouns that keep us awake at night. And then there are the nouns we can only experience such as hope, love, fear, peace. There are thousands of nouns in the English language and nearly a dozen categories of them.
It's possible to be against nouns as well as for them, although some of us prefer to exude mostly positive energy if we can. In large part, we live in a pro or con world. It’s pretty much the case that if we’re for something – say, a city-wide curfew at eleven o’clock sharp – we could be considered being against another things – such as residents’ right to dance in the streets whooping and hollering until two o’clock in the morning. The for-or-against game gets way more serious than dancing in the moonlight, of course, and cuts much deeper across families and communities. And those are two important nouns in need of support and conservation for all who are interested in the future of the noun we all walk upon every day.
We simply cannot assume that nouns will always be with us. Consider the wooly mammoth and the dodo bird. Or certain orchids and some species of frogs. Are we human beings careening toward a similar fate? Will anything shift the trajectory of devastation, decay, and death? Life is precarious. Life is precious. Life deserves to be supported and preserved. How many of us who possess this marvelous gift will strive and succeed to live in a manner which conserves such a sacred noun?
Comentarios