“The evolution of language always encounters resistance, and sometimes outrage.”
(John McWhorter)
A poem by Danez Smith in Poetry, July-August 2025, titled “They/Them” should be read whole but, to be brief, starts:
said short: i feel more like a stud. said
with some nuance: as if i came to
masculinity through the women’s gate,
[…]
and ends:
of course you should address me in the plural.
said short: i am everyone. I am everything.
said shorter: i am.
There’s a focus on shrugging off gender-laden singularity in favor of an anonymizing plural. What language does is “build a room for living.” So talk about me as if about the nexus of “me’s” that comprise who I am, including the one I feel like, the “me” I live in. Give my personhood a “they” address.
Does that re-iterate the case? Where’s the harm, I ask myself, in respecting someone’s wish to be “said” in the plural? “Thou,” after all, by slow degrees got replaced by plural “you” in the mouths of the many as speech habits adapted to social behaviors.
My impulse to skirt judgment, however, might have me treading water in what evangelical Allie Beth Stuckey calls “toxic empathy,” a misbegotten immersion in the feelings of others which needs tamping down with a dose of biblical tough love in her telling. The argument’s burden is: God made two sexes, separate, distinct, recognizable, immutable, arguably unequal. He said so textually in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, perhaps Latin, too.
The English koine will sort itself on the matter in the fullness of time, as tongues do. Meanwhile, poetry runs rich and rife. Danez Smith sings of mad love in “Dear Time.”
[…]
i tie my time to you, to you who knows most intimately
what is wrong with me, who has seen me at my most naked,
ass out, my toothless ashy soul naked and cold
and shameful in front of god, what a thing, love, i am so happy
to be stupid this way. […]
The speaker’s grandma asks about the speaker’s partner:
[…] what kinda mexican is he? and I told her
Venezuelan so now I call him Venezuelan-Mexican when I want to be cute.
Here’s a soaring, unvarnished take on the matriarch’s grandness:
and no this isn’t me canceling my grandma
because you, time, you cancel all grandmas, but she was speaking
within the limits of the language she has, pressing into that wall
for understanding and my grandma isn’t racist she’s difficult and careful
and nosey and serious and simple and a touch cold
and funny and a little mean and she spends her time in the kitchen
cause that work is how she loves us and she’s exactly the kind of poet
i want to be when i arrive deeper and frailer into time. […]
Who doesn’t want to be talked about like that when time lowers the boom?
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
‘I Came Into the World Very Young’
“Study for a bust of Mr. Erik Satie painted by himself, with a thought: I came into the world very young during a very old time.” [New York Times caption and illustration, my translation]
I discovered Satie long ago through Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, and liked the music immediately. I thought of him as a “minor” composer, and I was drawn to perceived niche tastes. I crave even now the unmoored feeling that his music gave me then.
Satie’s “Vexations,” came with instructions to repeat them 840 times, entailing a running time of about 19 hours. Here’s the thing: “Strangely, it resists memorization. Pianists have played it for long stretches, stood up from their instruments and realized they already forgot it.”
“Bohéme” (“The Bohemian”), a portrait of Satie in his studio in Montmartre by his friend Santiago Rusiñol. Credit… Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Vexations! A lovely moniker. It reminds me of my experience with certain poetry: I interact with it as intensely as I can; maybe it marks me somehow, yet it scampers out of range of the retentive faculty.
He would write for performers to play “from the top of yourself” and “full of subtlety, if you believe me.” He seemed fixated on body parts, with instructions like “with tears in your fingers,” “on the tips of your back teeth” or “out of the corner of your hand.”
A performance of Satie’s “Parade,” a collaboration with Cocteau, Picasso and the choreographer Léonide Massine for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Credit… Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images. [New York Times caption and illustration]
(Joshua Barone, “Satie’s Music Will Always Be Popular. But Will We Ever Understand It?” New York Times, 7-2-25)
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved