Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter Page B

If you’re going to start using it to mean one person, then where do you draw the line? Why can’t we just start using we to mean “you”? Or “asparagus”?
    An answer to all of this is one that is not exactly tidy, but urgent nonetheless.
    No language makes perfect sense.
    That’s another way of saying: there is no known language that does not have wrinkles of illogicality here and there. If one is to impose an aesthetic preference upon English or any other language, it cannot be one involving perfect order and endless clean lines, because no language like that has ever been spoken, anywhere, by anyone. Rather, one must revel in disorder. Not chaos, but perhaps the contained disorder of an ideal English garden, where it is considered proper to allow certain plants to ramble here and there, certain flowers to spread, drip, dot, dapple. Call them marks of character.
    Pronouns, as it happens, are one of the places where languages tend to drip a bit. Russian, for example, gets weird in the Billy and me zone, too. To refer to yourself and someone else, you refer to yourself as “we.” So Me and my wife is My s ženoj (“We and the wife”). (Don’t be misled by the chance similarity between English me and Russian my ; Russian’s my means “we.”) This is no “royal” we —it is the only way to say it. The we usage crept in out of a sense that you are referring to two people of which you are one, which is the definition of we -ness, just as we say Everybody can have their own piece of cake because “everybody” brings to mind lots of people rather than one body. In the same way, in Russian you do not say He and Ivan went fishing , but They and Ivan went fishing . Russians do not consider My s ženoj a mistake: it just is. All languages leak.
    In Hebrew and other languages in its Semitic family, there is something that truly makes no damned sense and you just have to deal with it. Adjectives take a feminine ending when used with feminine nouns—no surprise there. Adjectives come after the noun, and so Mazal tov (“good luck,” “congratulations”), but Šana tova (“good year,” “Happy New Year”). But for some reason, numbers above two turn it around: they take a feminine ending with masculine nouns and no ending with feminine ones. Kibbutzes are male in Hebrew, and so three kibbutzes: kibutzim Šlo Ša. Bananas are women, and so three bananas is bananot ŠaloŠ This just is. Israelis don’t “not like” it. It’s been that way forever, it’s that way in Arabic, it’s just that way. All languages leak.
    Or then there’s a language in which when, and only when, you use a verb in the third person singular you pin a z sound to the end of it. That is, English: the ending is written as an - s , but if you think about it, it’s usually pronounced as z : tries (you don’t say “trice”), mows, kills, tars, bids, wags, and so on. Having a conjugational ending in the present only for the third person singular is vastly rare, believe it or not (I am aware of it in no other language on earth and am not alone among linguists in that), and surely part of the reason is that it doesn’t really make sense. What’s it there for? Wouldn’t the language be more logical if there were just no endings? Notice that this is exactly where many speakers try to take English in their colloquial speech—only to be condemned as making a “grammatical error”!
    Which brings us to an idea some might have that even if all languages to date leak, there isn’t anything wrong with trying to make English the first exception. We, after all, do have things like coffee and broccoli and electricity. We had the Enlightenment. Far be it from us to accept the natural as the inevitable, one might say.
    But to plug up all of English’s holes, you’d have to get rid of a lot more than singular they , Billy and me, and a few other blips that happen to attract so much attention. For example, what about good old meaningless do ? It