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Social engineering in action: The word "they"

I wrote earlier why the word "they" is being artificially and forcefully pushed onto the English language as "the gender-neutral singular pronoun" for all the wrong political reasons.

The scary thing is that it works. It's currently the perfect example of bona fide social engineering: Artificially and deliberately affecting and modifying the wider society, how people behave or how they speak, for a particular purpose (rather than the change forming naturally).

Matt Parker is a youtuber and mathematics popularizer. I really like his videos, but it appears that he has either been completely brainwashed by this social engineering, or he's furtively an activist trying to participate in the social engineering himself. He's constantly, and I mean constantly, littering his videos with the word "they" everywhere at every possible moment. Whether deliberately or inadvertently, I don't know. However, it makes his videos a bit annoying to watch.

Consider, for example, this video of his. Let me quote what he says starting from 3:58:

"Tana Wattanawaroon, well done! They sent through a whole slide deck showing their logic, and it's just lovely, it's really really good. So I'm gonna steal a whole bunch of this slide, so Tana, excellent work explaining it. So they went through their logic and they very much took the approach of looking it as afterwards if you were to cut off all the cards, you're just gonna have this stack of cards going all the way down, and then they looked at the different orderings those cards could end up from their starting positions. What they very quickly realized, the orientation is irrelevant because the cards always end up in the same orientation once they have been folded into the stack. In fact, they then went through and just drew them... so this is they saying they ever considered one ordering of the arrangement in the stack and then they went through and they actually just started with them in the correct arrangement on the correct sides and they always end up face up in the final stack."

A few of those "theys" refer to the cards rather than the person, but that only helps making the whole thing even more confusing.

Also notice that several of those instances of the word "they" are superfluous and could have been left out without the grammar or understandability suffering. It almost feels like he's using that word as much as possible, littering his speech with it beyond what's reasonable (inadvertently or deliberately, I don't know).

And this isn't a particularly "they"-heavy segment. Most of his videos are likewise littered with the use of that word, often even when referring to people whose name is very unambiguously male or female. As said, it's a bit annoying to listen to his videos because of this. It just sounds like he's constantly repeating "they they they them they their them they they they them their they they them they..."

But this is exactly how social engineering works: It's precisely this kind of action that normalizes the usage, no matter how artificial and awkward. This is the perfect example of social engineering.

Comments

  1. I also find Mr. Parker’s use of they to be distraction in his otherwise-great videos.

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