Words as Well-Meaning Cudgels
Words are not to be feared—only weighed, measured and found wanting the proper context. (TW: Words. Pronouns. Vulgarity.)
“In our century, we’ve learned not to fear words.” — Lt. Uhura of the 23rd century, “The Savage Curtain”
In the dysfunctional 32nd century papier-mâché future depicted by Star Trek: Discovery, somehow the Federation’s denizens have either regressed from or never fully adopted this cultural affectation. As with any fish-out-of-water story, the crew of this misbegotten Discovery find that they themselves are as anachronistic as their 23rd century ideals.
A polarizing, inexorable cultural clash “climaxes” in Star Trek: Discovery’s mid-season “The Sanctuary”: Adira Tal, an expat from a regressed and xenophobic Earth (a “futuristic” Westernized simulacrum of 2020 CE’s Earth), decides to address the tardigrade — the unbalanced size and weight of an African elephant, one might say — in the engine room. After previous episodes festooned the good ship Lollipop’s corridors and rooms with “pronoun lanterns” vis-a-vis Adira, the gestalt uber-genius shakily puts their foot down once they figure out that they have found a safe space. They, not she.
It’s a ham-fisted, inorganic moment unsalvageable by well-meaning performers giving it their best, for their own writers failed them. What’s one to expect, for it is the inevitable result of institutionalized incompetence that only sausage-factory bureaucracy could manufacture.
In attempting to seize the zeitgeist as one would attempt a crazed eagle, Star Trek: Discovery’s ever-revolving writing staff hooked upon the outrage de jour: pronouns.
Having grown up in an era of “political correctness” that swept the United States in the 1990s, and consequently the hallowed offices across the Paramount lot during Rick Berman’s reign of the franchise, it is easy for me to see that pronouns are the latest battlefield over the malleable English language.
To deny any language’s fluidity is folly, for it changes over time as it must. Were you to compare languages to the development of species, you would find that words follow the same life cycle. Some of them grow, others become extinct… while other words are cross-bred for our amusement, like the various species of dogs humanity usurped for their own purposes. Even now, these bastardizations run amok in the English language, with their in-bred deficiencies wreaking havoc upon their users.
Language represents a culture and, when grokked in the proper context, one can discern a culture’s changes and turning points—no different than an arborist can discern environmental changes occurring during the life of a tree by its rings. At least, before the carcass is removed from its forest and sent to a paper mill, merged with horse glue, and reincarnated in word tomes known as dictionaries.
As a testament to European colonization of the Americas, American English dictionaries are replete with assimilated words — “loanwords,” if you wish your nouns blunted with a flourish belying their dubious nature — that we now make use of. Some of them are Germanic, having been assimilated well before the migration of German scientists from the oppressive Nazi Germany circa 1930s. To wit, the aforementioned concept “zeitgeist” — the thing that Star Trek’s present staff continually strive to possess like the Holy Grail — was assimilated as early as 1835 CE. Others are taken from the indigenous peoples who had previously staked claims across the many lands that America’s forebearers wrested by hook and by crook.
As to the rightness of the appropriation of physical resources and linguistic baubles, the fact is that we must live with the decisions established by our forebears. As we live on usurped land, we too live with such ideas ensconced in the meaning of appropriated words. Some words are either assimilated or forged with the best of intentions, others despite them — becoming part of our every day thoughts, actions, and declarations — with varying degrees of ignorance, willful or otherwise.
As “The Savage Curtain” of a past Star Trek demonstrated, faux pas are easily corrected without pomp and circumstance. Even if they are offered by a simulacrum of a past historical figure and corrected by a skilled communications officer on the nerve center of a starship.
To be clear, we should neither object nor fear the basic courtesy of addressing people by their desired name, pronoun, salutation, etc. Asking a fellow human being for their pronoun is no different than asking for their name, and it speaks to proper decorum and allows ease of discourse between persons.
In fact, if you ask if I fear the word they, I do not…
… after all, for countless years, I’ve referred to various people as fuckers, imbeciles, assholes, dipshits, morons, tools… all gender-fluid and gender-neutral terms, some of them quite visceral as the nuanced higher settings on fictional phasers. (Risking digression for a moment, do pray tell: what is the difference between “kill” and “disintegrate”? A matter of degree? A degree influenced by external dictates? Insatiable, fleeting emotional inclinations?)
Beyond the geeky — nerdy? — digression, as a fucker myself, I strongly suspect I’m not alone in that, for are we not all assholes, continually defecating ideology, symbology, and theology upon and before one another? Has not the Internet proven to be the watercooler-cum-toilet for the disgorgement of the bowels, as the late Harlan Ellison once maintained?
For instance, I have since lost count on the many Americans who have mispronounced my French family name during such in-person (or verbal) discourse on a variety of topics.
Having been on the receiving end of faux pas myself, I cannot and will not take them personally, for life’s a brief and inconsequential zephyr occurring prior to a greater storm, wherein the ego-driven deeds of both conquerors and heroes are washed away. Why sully a brief time with squabbles over whether or not to respect someone by calling them by their desired noun or pronoun?