My Dilemma

 

 

I have a dilemma,

I must return to school,

Come on man, give me a hearing!

I am serious, I am no fool.

 

Forty years as an educator

Imparting what I had learned

And thirteen years prior to that

And now I must unlearn.

 

I must beg your indulgence

As I try to explain myself,

To be quite honest with you

This is affecting my health.

 

Not a problem with Math

At least, not yet,

But a major one with English Language

Which I now have to vet.

 

While back in primary school

I was taught English Language,

Now sixty years thereafter

It’s become difficult to manage.

 

Please, please,

I am getting to the matter,

Just hear me out and after this

I’ll no longer be a bother.

 

As a friend of mine would say

Let us be more specific,

This is about some special pronouns

Including he, she and it.

 

I learnt at school and taught

That ‘he’ is a masculine pronoun

‘She’ is regarded as feminine

And ‘it’ to neither belong.

 

They taught me ‘it’ is neuter

And that I knew for sure,

But neutered keeps on coming up

And I am confused the more.

 

Now these are singular pronouns

But there is the plural case:

Let me now identify these

And this I will do in haste.

 

 

Singular: he, she and it-

Plural: they and them!

I understood this quite readily then

But now I have a problem.

 

Now it seems we aim to please

A certain ‘minority group’

And this my friend, I will tell you,

Is how far we have stooped.

 

They intend to do away

With the ‘he’ and with the ‘she’

And propose that ‘they’ be used inclusively

To accommodate their absurdity.

 

For ‘him’ and ‘her’, I should mention,

We would use the pronoun ‘them’

But for singular and plural

This presents a problem.

 

How would we differentiate

Whether it’s singular or plural?

The way I learnt it back in school

This was rather simple.

 

I say refer to them as ‘it’

If they are neither he nor she

But do not mash up English Language

For this perverted stupidity.

 

So now you see my dilemma

And why I must go back to school,

It’s to unlearn what made sense back then

And now become a fool.

 

Stewart Russell © April 19, 2023