John McWhorter

1 month ago | aei.org | Jonah Goldberg |John McWhorter

Jonah Goldberg knows many a public intellectual, but linguist extraordinaire John McWhorter is one of his favorites. John returns to the show to discuss his new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | John McWhorter

I've long thought that using "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun - as in "My cousin had long hair and they got it cut today" - is just great. It's been used that way for at least 600 years, whether pedants like it or not. "A person can't help their birth" (Thackeray in "Vanity Fair"). "And whoever finds himself out of such blame / They will come up and offer in God's name" (Chaucer in "The Canterbury Tales"). To many English speakers, it has long felt quite natural.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | John McWhorter

I spent last week in Australia, and had some experiences that made the trip well worth the long flight. I devoured what I am reasonably sure is the best lamb meat pie on earth, I saw an echidna and I had some illuminating conversations about linguistics with professors and students. In one of those conversations, I learned about a language kerfuffle from a few years ago that took me back to the 1990s, and reminded me of how beautiful and complex nonstandard speech can be.

2 months ago | nickgillespie.substack.com | Nick Gillespie |John McWhorter

The guest on the new Reason Interview is Columbia University linguist and New York Times columnist. In 2021, he published Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, which argued that politically correct "antiracism" was not only a new religion but a dangerous form of illiberalism that quashed free expression, individual liberty, and social progress. Flash forward to now: Ibram X.

2 months ago | nytimes.com | John McWhorter

What was surprising about the pejoration of "woke," however, was how quickly it happened. The expression "politically correct" emerged among Communists in the 1930s and became common in the mainstream as both a term of praise and as an ironic comment on adherence to party dogma. Only in the late 1980s did it become a slur from the right against the left, hissingly abbreviated to "P.C.""Woke," in contrast, became a slur within a mere few years of its appearance in the mainstream.