Happy National Grammar Day, to those who celebrate*
* Void where prohibited.
---
Today is National Grammar Day, celebrated annually on March 4th because it’s a day that’s a complete sentence—“march forth”—if you believe that “fourth” and “forth” are the same word.
National Grammar Day is prohibited in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Its status in Montana and Utah remains uncertain, and if conservatives prevail, it could be banned nationally as well.
As you see from the list of states where National Grammar Day is not celebrated, it is not a national holiday. Which means that calling National Grammar Day “national” is grammatically incorrect.
But why be picky on National Grammar Day? It’s a day to reflect on the infinite variety of human languages and their ability to adapt and change with our circumstances and communicative needs.
Unfortunately, on National Grammar Day the grammar police will be out in force, eager to correct other people’s language. But you don’t want to pit grammarians against libertarians. Because the National Grammar Day slogan is,
"Everybody wants to be correct, but nobody wants to be corrected."
Even so, this year the grammar police will be on the lookout for people using pronouns. They’ll start in states where it is illegal to use pronouns (these tend to be states where National Grammar Day is not celebrated), but their goal is to ban pronouns nationally.
On National Grammar Day, all sorts of people will declare on their socials that they don’t use pronouns. You won’t be able to block them fast enough.
And they’ll add that forcing anyone to use a pronoun violates the First Amendment. At least that’s the opinion of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, a case about the rights of transgender employees that he actually lost, Alito wrote a 70-page rant about the unconstitutionality of requiring people to use someone’s gender pronouns. It’s compelled speech, which violates the First Amendment, at least most of the time.
Speaking of compelled speech, it wasn't so long ago that conservatives wanted to compel schools to teach grammar. Grammar lessons were also a sure-fire way to put a class to sleep. But now that pronouns are grammar, grammar is woke and the far right wants to stomp it out.
Wrapping themselves in the mantle of free speech, right-wingers are defending everyone’s right to say things that aren’t true. Especially things about grammar. For example, last year, Barney Bishop, the head of Florida’s Tallahassee Classical School, a charter school that prides itself on teaching Latin, used three pronouns to tell an interviewer, “We don’t use pronouns.”
Pace Bishop, you can’t speak Latin without pronouns. And as Bishop demonstrated, you can’t speak English without them either.
Florida is just one of several pronoun-denying states. Florida’s HB 1069 proclaims, “It is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to that person’s sex.” That law is designed to ban pronouns used by people who are gay, trans or nonbinary. Most people, including those who are gay, trans, or nonbinary, use pronouns like he and she, traditional gender pronouns that have been part of English since forever. Others adopt innovative gender-inclusive pronouns, though many of them are more than a century old, pronouns like E (coined in 1841), zie (1890), hie (1914), and hir (1920). The law would also ban singular they, which goes all the way back to 1375. Singular they is centuries older than singular you.
Other red states have anti-pronoun laws. Arizona’s SB 1700 would let a parent challenge any book that “promotes gender fluidity, gender pronouns or grooms children into normalizing pedophilia.” Which means you could challenge any book with “he” or “she,” because they are classic gender pronouns—in fact their main job is to announce gender. But SB 1700 conflicts with Arizona’s Language Arts Standards, which require that all first graders learn about and be able to “use personal . . . pronouns,” which means teaching them the concept of gender. And those standards conflict with a different law that says Arizona schools are not allowed to teach about gender until fifth grade.
Attacking pronouns turns out to be an exercise in free speech leveraged to prevent someone else from speaking, someone whose ideas you don’t like. Here’s how that’s done: Arkansas HB 1468 calls pronouns “a matter of free speech and academic freedom” but then goes on to prohibit instructors from using a pronoun “inconsistent” with their “biological sex” to refer to anyone under 18 without parental permission.
Indiana is another state requiring parental approval if a student wants to go by a different name or pronoun. Many schools believe the requirement applies to nicknames as well. If Dennis wants to be Denny, they will need a note from home.
Tennessee banned evolution in 1925, and in 2016 it went after grammatical evolution as well by forbidding the use of state funds “to promote the use of gender neutral pronouns.” In 2023 Tennessee passed a law defending teachers’ free speech but prohibiting the teaching of divisive concepts like sex and gender, which presumably includes divisive grammatical concepts like pronouns, because even traditional pronouns like “he” and “she” are all about gender.
Missouri’s HB 1739, filed for consideration in the 2024 legislative session, would require parental notification within twenty-four hours if a student wants to use a name that is not on their birth certificate. In addition, teachers, nurses, and other employees are forbidden from using any student’s unauthorized gender pronoun. Anyone guilty of violating the law would be fired for “incompetence, immorality, or neglect of duty.”
Not to be outdone, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whose birth name is Raphael Edward Cruz, introduced a bill he’s calling the Safeguarding Honest Speech Act, “To prohibit the use of funds . . . requiring certain employees to refer to an individual by the preferred pronouns of such individual or a name other than the legal name of such individual” (S. 3318). Raphael’s bill is not expected to pass.
Legislating pronouns, or anything else about language, is not a good idea. Pres. Teddy Roosevelt, who spoke softly and carried a big stick, once issued an executive order that would simplify American spelling. It didn’t end well. After a couple of weeks he was forced to abandon the plan.
Laws prohibiting pronouns may be ideologically driven, but they have grammatical fallout. For example, Florida and other states now say that once a parent authorizes a trans student’s name and pronoun change, the school will honor the new name but it doesn’t have to use the new pronoun. The student’s new name may be Anne, but the teacher who believes that sex and gender are immutable can refer to Anne as “he.” In effect, Florida has made it legal for teachers to be ungrammatical—on National Grammar Day.
