Q Toon: Dey, Dem, Deir

I finally got around to recognizing Merriam Webster's Word of the Year for 2019: "They," used as a third person singular pronoun to refer to someone who doesn't feel themself to be "He" or "She."

Well, to be honest, I have drawn about this already, but it was well before the year "They" was the Word of.

I can be a stickler for traditional language — don't you dare use "literally" figuratively around me — but I'm with the modernists on this one. "They, Them, Their" are already commonly used to refer to any person whose sex is unknown or whose existence is purely hypothetical, replacing the awkward "He/She, Him/Her, His/Her." What is new is using those pronouns to refer to a specified person whose identity, if not their sex, is known.

I'm not sure why or when Gino expects Tex to talk about dem in the third person anyway. Maybe dey is networking. Or dey are. Pronoun-verb agreement rules may still need to be worked out. The point is that it's just as well to announce one's pronouns at the outset and avoid embarrassing corrections later.

If Tex is fine with that, it's just something the rest of us will have to get yoused to.

✍

I'll bet Glenn Miller and the Dorsey Brothers never had to deal wit' dis:

I got word that one of my newspaper editors was puzzled by this week's cartoon, on account of "dey, dem, deir" being the way Jamaicans and Nigerians pronounce "they, them, their."

I had hoped that the New York Jets tattoo on Gino's shoulder would be ample indication that dey hails from Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Queens.

While checking whether residents of those New York boroughs are more likely to be Jets fans or Giants fans, I came across reporting that the "th" (as in "thin") and "dh" (as in "the") sounds are among the last that English-speaking children master. They are completely absent from many languages around the world, not just in Jamaica and Nigeria; many foreigners have as much difficulty pronouncing them as English speakers have with Spanish "ll," German "ch," Khoisan clicks, or the capital of Ukraine.

Non-English speakers often substitute "t" and "d," or "s" and "z," in English "th" words, and I have to wonder whether that means that they are unable to imitate people who lisp. I can't believe that lisping is a strictly Anglophone phenomenon.

At any rate, setting aside the Nigerian question for the moment, the issue of whether Gino might perhaps be Jamaican raises another question: what is the gender-neutral substitute for the Jamaican "mon"?