In a heartbreaking tale of unchecked dorkiness, 28-year-old Lauren Laud is complaining about the grammatical correctness of one person using they/them pronouns like some sort of huge fucking nerd.
“I totally support people identifying beyond the binary,” says Lauren, a nerdling. “But I just can’t get behind referring to one person as ‘they’.”
“I swear it’s just a grammar thing,” Lauren adds. “For instance, if someone left a coat in my bedroom after a party, I would say, ‘Someone left his or her coat in here.’ That’s just correct English.”
Wow. It’s so sad that this dweeb’s commitment to a set of static rules within a made-up and deliberatively adaptive system is making her antagonize non-binary people and say weird shit like “His or her coat”.
Lauren’s fifth grade English teacher Oriana Reich weighed in on the situation.
“If I spoke to her today, I would encourage her to understand that language is always evolving and being dogmatic about grammar at the expense of respecting people’s identities is not a trade off that follows the Golden Rule,” says Reich. “But really I’d rather not speak to her today because she was a pretty huge fucking nerd back then, and it doesn’t sound like much has changed.”
While ‘they’ is recognized as a grammatically correct singular pronoun by Merriam-Webster, that’s not enough for Lauren to make the switch to not being the worst.
“I know that technically it’s in the dictionary now as a singular or unspecified pronoun,” Lauren says. “But that’s just not how I learned it, and my brain’s never gonna work that way.”
It’s so tragic that Lauren is such a nerd, but also a dumb nerd who apparently isn’t able to learn new things.
“There should just be a different singular pronoun that isn’t gendered,” says Lauren. “Oh, there are a number of those? Okay, well now this is just too complicated. I’ll stick to what makes grammatical sense!”
Yikes. Here’s hoping Lauren becomes less of a massive narc-ass nerd soon.
