Columbia Prof: Let’s Get Rid of “He” and “She” and Replace it with “Ze” – IOTW Report

Columbia Prof: Let’s Get Rid of “He” and “She” and Replace it with “Ze”

A Columbia Professor of linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history believes it’s time to stop calling girls and boys “she” and “he.” Instead, Professor John McWhorter believes that people should use the word “ze.”

Professor McWhorter, writing on CNN.com, says that “conceptions of gender… are most certainly changing” and so should the words we use to refer to people.

“In this new world,” he writes, “a bland opposition between “he” and “she” seems increasingly antique, and even insulting, to many.”
CNN He and She
It’s going to be tough for people to use “ze” instead of the words they’ve been using all of their lives, McWhorter admits. However, “there is room for presenting “ze” as a matter not of fashion, but of basic civility — people must think of new pronouns as the proper thing to do, not as a stunt.”

Further, the word “they” should be changed to also mean one person instead of more than one. “They” should become both “singular and plural,” writes McWhorter.

People will change to “ze” eventually, McWhorter believes: “Assessing the prospects of new pronouns like ze and recast pronouns like they, my bet would be on they, in terms of the chances that, in 50 years, everybody is on board and on to the next controversy.”

He concludes, “What we do know, however, is that we are at a point where anglophones will need to accept some kind of change in how we use the language. Call it a teaching moment –language not only never stops changing, but could not.”

41 Comments on Columbia Prof: Let’s Get Rid of “He” and “She” and Replace it with “Ze”

  1. while islam is throwing gays off of buildings and isis is crucifying and burning people, we are instead worried about the hurtful use of he and she

    enough of the fiddle-faddle from the numbskulls of our greater learning institutions

    what an unmanly embarrassment

    if you want to be a ze, go off and do so, along with whatever it means sexually, and knock yourself out

    leave me the fuck out of it, as i am a zenophobe

  2. It is said that a college education today is what a high school education was 50 years ago. With the tenured professors of today I’d go even further and equate it with preschool.

  3. Some brief research and quick math reveals that tuition and fees at Columbia are presently $53,000/yr., and Room & Board are an additional $12,800./yr.

    That’s $66K/yr. for those of you playing at home, and that doesn’t include travel, incidentals, or “fun money”. For, like, booze, or hookers, or gender mutilations.

    And this is the sorry shit that they’re filling Johnny and Sally’s heads with? Or, sorry, Ze and Ze’s heads with?

    As a parent of two college aged kids who I’m currently putting through state colleges, let me just say…

    Fuck that.

  4. Gee Wally, he sounds like a degreed, dumbed-down, self-absorbed, spoon-fed, celebrity-obsessed, White guilt-ridden, Birkenstock-wearing, bottled-water-drinking, kumbaya-singing, Xanax-disabled, Rainbow Plantation, COEXIST bumper-sticker, Politically Correct, Liberal perfesser of Limpguistics!

  5. I heard Bernie Sanders say that last night. He didn’t identify why this is though. It is because after 4 years of college now you have only learned the equivalent (or less) of what was learned in high school only a few decades ago.

    Over 60% of high school grads aren’t capable of doing 1st year college work – which means that colleges are having to teach basic English / math skills at a high school level now:

    http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2012/08/22/high-school-students-not-prepared-for-college-career

    Colleges these days teach young, impressionable kids what to think rather than how to think. Things like “you should be personally offended at anything you disagree with” and “anyone of Anglo Saxon heritage is guilty of all the ills that plague humanity today” (this apparently doesn’t apply to other Caucasian people though).

    Teaching kids to be confused about even the most basic facts like whether you’re a boy or a girl is not what any sane person would consider “higher learning”, yet that is where we are today.

  6. And how do we translate that form of “english” into languages that use feminine/masculine? Are those languages going to have to transform to that idiot’s liking, too?

    How do you report a crime to the police?
    Do we drag everyone in town into a lineup because we’re too PC to actually call a person what they are?

    Are doctors not allowed to use medical terms specifically related to the female and male anatomy?

    Mental exams for all teachers, state and federal employees.

  7. “Harpending noted, “The problem was that in the Kalahari, ‘San’ has all the baggage that the ‘N-word’ has in America. Bushmen kids are graduating from school, reading the academic literature, and are outraged that we call them ‘San.'”

    “I knew very well,” he said, “That one did not call someone a San to his face. I continued to use Bushman, and I was publicly corrected several times by the righteous. It quickly became a badge among Western academics: If you say ‘San’ and I say ‘San,’ then we signal each other that we are on the fashionable side, politically. It had nothing to do with respect. I think most politically correct talk follows these dynamics.”

    http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/06/name-game.html

  8. john mcwhorter the fifth is a mid century model socialist. a fifty year old black man who is very very very much in the queer camp but like barky, still closeted,

    who knew that at 60k a year, your darlings are instructed to
    use the phrase “like” with abandon. john thinks so.

  9. “If I survive the war (which I won’t) and if I am crowned Holy Roman Emperor (which I won’t be, because I’m a chick and a peasant and all that), the first thing I would do, even before nuking Mecca and Medina into an inland sea of glass, would be to burn to the ground, plough the ashes and then salt the earth (just to be sure), COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

    If there is an actual, physical portal to hell on this, God’s Good Earth, it is somewhere within Columbia University.”

    -Ann Barnhardt
    ______________________________

    I agree.

  10. Gods’ Word however, will never shift or change.
    Flippin’ a bird at word changers.
    Changing the truth to lie takes time, and people who’ve all been made in Gods’ image will be complicit in it to those who’ll deny Him.

  11. Maybe we should replace professors with plumbers, then colleges wouldn’t be so backed up with shit and the kids would learn something useful for a lucrative career.
    Plumbers only have 3 rules:
    1. Hot goes on the left.
    2. Shit runs downhill.
    3. Never bite your nails.

  12. Call em whatever you fucking want.
    A fag is still a fag.
    A retard is still a retard.
    A bear is still a bear.

    A thing’s nature doesn’t change because some dipshit calls it by euphemism.

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