That time I spent 3 hours debating if 'they' was a valid pronoun in a 1990s novel

I was in a book club last month arguing about whether using 'they' for a character in a Stephen King book from 1993 made sense historically. Half the group said it broke immersion, the other half said language evolves. Took us 45 minutes just to agree that the author wasn't being political, he just wrote a weird character. Has anyone else had a grammar debate derail an entire meeting?

2 comments

2 Comments

elliot_harris254d ago

That whole thing about 'they' being in a 90s novel is interesting, but did anyone actually go back and check if the author used it that way on purpose or if it was just how people talked back then? Sounds like half the fight might have been about modern politics instead of the actual text. The irregardless thing is classic though, someone definitely just wanted out of talking about the book's ending. So when you finally got past the pronoun debate, did the book club actually have anything good to say about the actual story, or was everyone too tired to care?

dixon.rose4d ago

My book club once spent an entire hour arguing about whether "irregardless" should count as a word when it showed up in a character's dialogue. The person who brought it up was actually just trying to avoid talking about the plot.