Who is They?
Who is They?
Charged with finding
An all-encompassing pronoun
The poet started with the nuclear family
But he quickly felt a wave of trepidation.
At the herculean scope of the project
It had already proven too much
For top linguists and intellectuals.
So why should he succeed?
The algorithms had been set for him
His dedication to the task
Meant that the more he looked
The more he found.
And the more he found
The more he had to find.
Pronouns tumbled off his tongue
Slipped through his fingers.
Dividing into increasingly
Smaller packets of meaning
Denoting sex and gender
In an ever-increasing complexity.
Mental acuity sidelined
By the pursuit of new pious permutations
Supercomputers spewed
And combed through data.
Filling vast digital depositories
With academic papers
Audio-visual banks overloaded with evidence
Of dialect and slang.
AI plans to relaunch obsolete languages.
Linguists scoured the data
Looking for the element
That would blend pronunciation with meaning.
Cults emerged, feeding on unease and mistrust
International conflicts were sparked over etymology.
The poet, puzzled about an escape, as huge protest movements
Got underway bearing the name of historic classifiers.
Linnaeus and Humboldt
As with all human endeavour that gets out of hand
Absurdity and obfuscation took hold
Elite German scientists locked themselves away for a year
To brainstorm a new pronoun – finally coming up with ‘they’.
Who is they, screamed the poet as he was dragged away.
