Mistakes Were Made

The case for getting rid of pronouns altogether is pretty strong. Gendered pronouns aren’t doing us much good, but I really have a bone to pick with personal pronouns (I, you, we).

Personal pronouns assign credit and blame. Say you and your coworker broke the printer

You jostled it too many times, but the intern, Peter, dealt the critical blow

When the manager comes in, you can:

1. claim full responsibility: “I broke the register”

2. rat Peter out: “He broke it”

3. share blame: “we broke it”

If none of these are appealing, there’s only one linguistic cartwheel left: avoid the pronoun entirely with passive voice!

So, you say to the manager, “the printer is broken. How can it be fixed?”

Essentially, the “mistakes were made” meme

More Analyzing the Meme

The Analyze the Meme series intends to take humor entirely too seriously! We’ll talk about the mechanics of a joke using some light linguistic analysis and speculate on who’s cracking jokes, what makes it witticism, and why it makes us laugh.