We're in a really interesting time there because it's no longer a rarity to know someone who was born as one gender and now identifies as something else.

And it requires a mental exercise of thinking about your use of pronouns when it's usually not what you think about.

You think about your use of real words, not the pronouns.

It's like having to think about the way you walk.

And now the Good Fight with Yasha Monk.

My guest today is a well-known writer and an old friend of this podcast and of persuasion, John McWurter.

John, of course, is one of the most incisive cultural commentators of this moment.

I learned a lot from his last book about identity politics, but he is a trained linguist,

who is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and that is the domain that his new book

is all about. It is called, Throneown Trouble, The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. It's a delightful read and it set us up for

a really interesting conversation about whether languages should be prescriptive or descriptive,

whether we should have preferences, for example, about literally how much we misuse the word literally.

We talked about how pronouns in the English language are different

from the usage in other languages.

Why it is that English has a certain poverty of pronouns,

very few pronouns compared to other languages like German, for example.

We talked about the controversial rise of the singular pronoun,

of whether there is something grammatically wrong with saying they,

to generically describe a student whose gender you're not specifying, and whether or not we should

accept they as a marker of pronouns for a particular person instead of he or she. Spoiler alert,

John argues that we should not resist us, but that is a perfectly appropriate use of language.

I also pushed him on other attempts to innovate language for political concerns.

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