Page 11 - MidWeek Kauai - Oct 13, 2021

According to family lore, when my immi- grant grandfather got off the boat at Ellis Island, all he possessed were the clothes on his back, a crust of bread and a nickel.
Waking Up To Woke
OCTOBER 13, 2021
KAUA‘I MIDWEEK 11
It’s a good thing he’s not try- ing to learn the language today. The rules of grammar once force-fed down the throats of innocent immigrants now are violated with impunity.
work, the author used the ex- ample: “Roberta wants a hair- cut and they also want some highlights.”
We don’t know how much of that is true, because our family lore is approximately as reliable as Facebook or Fox News. We’re not even sure where he came from. We think it was Romania, but depending upon who was winning what war at the time it might have been Hungary, Poland or Ger- many. Or Sweden.
The latest change creep- ing into the pages of Ameri- can publications calls for the elimination of the words “he,” “she,” “him” and “her,” to be replaced with “gender inclu- sive pronouns” such as “they” and “them.”
As an alternative, others have proposed creating new unisex words, such as “ie” in- stead of “he” or “she,” “zim” for “him” or “her” and “zie- self” for “himself” or “herself.”
Wherever he came from, Grandpa spoke five languages and said the rules of English were the most confusing.
Still, I have to wonder how Grandpa would have felt about all this if they hadn’t recently died 65 years ago.
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The movement gained sup- port last week in a New York Times editorial page column in which a learned professor traced the evolution of the En- glish language since Shake- speare invented it. To illustrate how this latest change would
I suppose I should concede that English is a fluid language, go with the flow and start writ- ing about my wife and what they is doing.
I’m guessing they would take zies nickel and go back to wherever them came from.
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