Category: the editorial page

  • ‘they’ is not a drop-in replacement for ‘he’ and ‘she’, but we could use one

    Singular usage of ‘they’ is well-established in English, going back centuries. Depending on your exposure to it, you may yourself use it regularly, as I happily do. It’s great having a single word that can refer to individuals whose gender is unclear or unspecified. However, gender-neutral ‘they’ and its friends ‘them’, ‘their’, and ‘theirs’, do…

  • Young Tsarnaev

    There’s your bomber. You’re looking at the face of the kid the Boston paramilitary police were hunting for. By the time they found him hiding in a boat, his brother had been killed in a firefight. Children of one of imperialism’s most brutal conflicts, five thousand miles from their parents, drifting in a place not…

  • Ideologue-y

    Do you ever feel that the previous generation just sees you as another potential acolyte to be indoctrinated and enlisted to fight the next big ideological war? In several situations I have felt like that. These were in linguistics, in economics, and—of course—in politics. In linguistics the philosophical divide basically shakes out as the rationalist,…