A rainbow in the falling drops

 

The intersection of Gault Lane and Burnet Road is home to a good-sized pond—good enough to host not one but two fountains that shoot jets of water upward. If you stand in an appropriate place at an appropriate time, as I did on the morning of July 7th, you’ll see a rainbow created by sunlight refracting through the multitude of drops as they fall back into the pond.

 

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Here’s a question I haven’t heard anyone else ask: When people who want others to refer to them as “they/them” speak about themselves, do they say “I” or do they say “we”? My guess is that virtually all of them still use the traditional singular, “I,” rather than the plural, “we.” Would that inconsistency undermine their insistence that other people refer to them as “they/them”?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. On the “not” side is the vernacular tradition of using “they/them/their” as an indeterminate personal pronoun. English speakers have been reinforcing that tradition a lot in recent years. For example, most people—especially young ones—wouldn’t find anything wrong with a sentence like “Anyone who wants to keep their teeth should brush and floss every day.”

Walt Whitman might well have sided with that usage:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

That’s from “Song of Myself,” not “Song of Ourselves.”

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman