Fun and instructive—and thou mayest emerge spaking they for that single person standing next to you.
They for a singular person? Says the eminent linguist: Why not?
He’s been branded a conservative, but McWhorter, who doesn’t avow the label, is no William Safire. Instead, in this pointed treatise, McWhorter considers the pronouns we use as both historical and ever-changing things, resisting conservatism, linguistic and otherwise: “I am a great fan of the new usage of they, and think it is a very sad thing that we are taught that it is a form of mental debility to use me and other object pronouns as subjects.” He’s not alone: McWhorter enlists a phalanx of English writers to back him up in various usages that became canonically disapproved only when the proto–grammar police set up shop back in Georgian times. Shakespeare, he notes, failed upward by using “Between you and I” in The Merchant of Venice, anticipating a matter that’s still of confusion: When I, and when me? McWhorter traces the sources of confusion all the way back to the evolution of our pronouns in Old English and even earlier: the old uncer, for our, widespread in English, turns up in supposedly unlettered dialects as you-uns, and as for y’all and youse, those are laudable—well, at least not condemnable—survivals of the old dual form in English, which distinguished the singular you (once marked by thou) and the plural, used to address both more than one person and the presumedly socially superior among us. “Really—if English were normal, we would be walking around with our flip-flops and iPhones and Drake and whole-grain pasta calling each other thou,” McWhorter writes. “It would be you that felt increasingly antique.” McWhorter gets deep into the weeds, and it helps to know a little about historical linguistics, but it’s not required.
Fun and instructive—and thou mayest emerge spaking they for that single person standing next to you.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780593713280
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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