Word: personal pronoun
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With the advent of a transgender alternative, English speakers find themselves in a grammatical conundrum. When pronouns like “he” and “her” no longer suffice, a person can only shy warily away from the shudder-inducing “it” and mumble inaudibly. Has political correctness finally exhausted the capacities of the English language? Wesleyan University has turned to a gender-neutral alternative: “ze.” “Students use it to refer to people who have requested it as their pronoun...
...Lennon apart from McCartney in terms of style. Lennon was a diarist , while McCartney was a dramatist. Many followed Lennon into the new world of singer/songwriter-dom. But few matched his poetry or honesty. For Lennon, confessional songwriting was much more than just the prominent use of the first-person pronoun, which seemed to become the norm in the self-obsessed...
...that. But first, maybe more puzzling: Why on Earth are so many people willing to let us look? To understand, you need to first look away from television. (Oh, just for a minute. You can do it.) Our culture is deep into a populist period of personal confession, the First-Person Era. There's the unflagging craze for memoirs--especially ordinary people's tales of woe, like Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and Elizabeth Kim's story of orphanhood, Ten Thousand Sorrows. "I don't see any sign of them waning," says Jeff Zaleski, book-review editor of Publishers...
...Gluck speaks to the Greeks without adopting their speech, she also eschews personal contract with her readers. Making copious use of the first person pronoun, Gluck nonetheless maintains distance. Although a good deal of Vita Nova is devoted to the regenerating power of memory, the memories recounted are usually slight images of rooms and smells. Gluck reveals herself largely through allegory and the retelling of myth, so that the presence of "I" throughout her book creates an atmosphere of polite poetics that never takes readers into themselves...
...they are smart, varied, powerful and uncompromising. At first, "As If Your Life Depended On It" seems to be a condemnation of used women in the vein of Hatfield's rant "Supermodel." However, an intricate pronoun game at work in the song reveals its actual subject: Hatfield herself. Instead of saying "I" over and over, Hatfield starts the song out in the second person, pointedly commenting on an unknown woman's pathetic dependency: "Crack a joke/light his smoke/as if your life depended...