September 10, 2014

I Have Gone Over to the Dark Side

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I have gone over to the dark side. I’ve been on the edge for a while, playing passive-aggressive games with my copy editor, but I guess I might as well just fess up. I now routinely use they and them as gender-neutral singular pronouns.1

I’m not proud of this. But he or she has always grated on the ear. Likewise, using he some of the time and she some of the time is just too damn much work. And it’s kind of confusing too. How careful are you going to be to use them equally? How much attention are you going to pay to make sure you aren’t using them in gendered ways (he when you’re writing about doctors, she when you’re writing about nurses)? Etc.

What other options are there? None. You can write around the problem, but that usually produces a mess. There have been a few feeble attempts to invent new pronouns, but they’ve gone nowhere and never will. So we’re stuck. The easiest thing is just to use they and them. Everyone knows what you mean, and except for us grammar pedants, nobody cares. I don’t think I have the will to resist anymore. I have been assimilated.

1See the previous post for an example—and for the proximate cause of this post.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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