Oct 14 • 29M

The Problem With You

English no longer draws a distinction between its second person pronouns — not officially anyway — yet we keep trying to draw it back.

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Appears in this episode

John McWhorter
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Society of Friends founder George Fox, whose followers retained the use traditional, familiar pronouns.

English used to have a more or less typical array of second person pronouns, with thou and thee for the singular — subject and object cases, respectively — and ye and you for the plural. So what happened? John explains.

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