If I needed to follow John McWhorter's new rule, I would think of "they" as a nickname for the person, rather than a pronoun.

As we discussed here, yesterday, John McWhorter has proposed using the singular form of the verb with the pronoun "they" when it is used to refer to only one person. 

I'm writing a new post, not to repeat the discussion about whether that's a good idea, but because it seems as though it would be quite difficult to force yourself to use "bad" English, and I realized what I would do to make it easier. This is all assuming that I wanted or needed to use "is" and "has" and "wants" with "they." For that person — the singular "they" — I would visualize "they" as a name — a noun.

I once listened to the audio version of a novel in which one of the main characters was named Yuu — "Earthlings," blogged here and here. (Buy it here, and you'll be sending me a commission.) The narrator pronounced Yuu, "you." I got used to hearing things like: "Yuu was the same age as me.... Yuu has been my boyfriend.... Yuu always sticks close to Natsuki...." 

"In her teens and twenties, she tried embracing conventional notions of womanhood just to avoid what she calls 'social harassment' before abandoning it in disgust."

"'I pretended to act the way I thought a cute woman should act, with an excess of femininity, but it was a horrible experience. I felt like I’d lost my will,' she says. In a relationship with a convenience store manager 15 years her senior, she found she was expected to cook morning and evening and do his washing. 'It felt like being physically and mentally exploited. I mean, I hate food and cooking – I keep a vase on top of my cooker,' she says, laughing.... Murata says she starts with her characters and doesn’t know the ending of her novels until she writes them. That might explain why Earthlings turns from whimsy to surrealist horror."

From "Sayaka Murata: 'I acted how I thought a cute woman should act - it was horrible" (The Guardian). I've finished the book now, so I'd like to discuss the ending. I'll put the spoilers — which are extreme — after the jump. Please consider reading the book — "Earthlings" — before reading more of this post.  Or skip the next section — the indented part — and the stop reading when I give the next big spoiler alert. And don't read the tags.

"I think the riskiest kind of novel is the one that tries to rescue us from mundane existence—by taking a closer look at mundane existence."

"If the tone falls flat, than the action is simply a series of discrete encounters, recreated on the page. In the best of these novels—from the work of Haruki Murakami to Albert Camus—the writer finds a tiny gap between the simple nature of things, and how they appear to us."

From "In Praise of Sayaka Murata/John Freeman on a Young Japanese Writer We Should All Be Reading." 

That review — in Literary Hub — was written 3 years ago, when the current Murata book was "Convenience Store Woman," which I thought was great. I'm reading it today because I'm reading her new book "Earthlings" and I don't want any spoilers to that.

ADDED: Sample text from "Earthlings":

“Deep down everyone hates work and sex, you know. They’re just hypnotized into thinking that they’re great.” My husband was always saying that. 

His parents, his brother and his wife, and his friends sometimes came to spy on us. My and my husband’s womb and testes were quietly kept under observation by the Factory. Anyone who didn’t manufacture new life—or wasn’t obviously trying to—came under gentle pressure. Couples that hadn’t manufactured new life had to demonstrate their contribution to the Factory through their work. My husband and I were living quietly in a corner of the Factory, keeping our heads down.

The first person character regards her town as a "factory for the production of babies." 

Loneliness — "A problem that almost anyone can relate to."

The quoted phrase is mine, from a post this morning about a NYT op-ed by a college sophomore titled "Advice From a Formerly Lonely College Student."

The Crack Emcee responded, "Almost" and linked to Greta Garbo's iconic "I want to be alone":



That made me think about something in a novel I just read, "Convenience Store Woman." The title character takes in a young man who proceeds to live in her bathtub. She wants him not as a lover or a companion but just so her friends and family won't be troubled by thinking of her as pathetic because she is a woman without a career or a man. He's not interested in her as a lover or a companion. Here's his explanation of all he wants:

“I want you to keep me hidden from society. I don’t mind you using my existence here for your own ends, and you can talk about me all you want. I myself want to spend all my time hiding here. I’ve had enough of complete strangers poking their noses into my business.... When you’re a man, it’s all ‘go to work’ and ‘get married.’ And once you’re married, then it’s ‘earn more’ and ‘have children’! You’re a slave to the village. Society orders you to work your whole life. Even my testicles are the property of the village! Just by having no sexual experience they treat you as though you’re wasting your semen... Your uterus belongs to the village too, you know. The only reason the villagers aren’t paying it any attention is because it’s useless. I want to spend my whole life doing nothing. For my whole life, until I die, I want to just breathe without anyone interfering in my life. That’s all I wish for,” he finished, holding his palms together as if in supplication.

I don't have a "loneliness" tag. I've always had "solitude." That is, I keep open the question whether being alone is a more negative experience than being with others. It's in that context that I made up my aphorism, "Better than nothing is a high standard."

Obviously, Garbo is unhappy. She wants to be alone not because it's sublime and rewarding, but because the alternative is sadder. The man in the bathtub is in even worse shape. And it's a cliché to say You can be lonely in a crowd. One might seek solitude because the loneliness is more painful when you are surrounded by people who are engaged with each other. You may do damaging, dangerous, regrettable things when feeling the pain of loneliness in a crowd.

"I’d noticed soon after starting the job that whenever I got angry at the same things as everyone else, they all seemed happy."

"If I went along with the manager when he was annoyed or joined in the general irritation at someone skiving off the night shift, there was a strange sense of solidarity as everyone seemed pleased that I was angry too. Now, too, I felt reassured by the expression on Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara’s faces: Good, I pulled off being a 'person.' I’d felt similarly reassured any number of times here in the convenience store."

From the novel "Convenience Store Woman" by Sayaka Murata, which is a fun, very fast read that's both light and deep. The audiobook reader is Nancy Wu, who's fantastic.

I had to look up the word "skiving." It means avoiding work. Another word I learned reading this book is "freeter":

When I was in my early twenties it wasn’t unusual to be a freeter, so I didn’t really need to make excuses. But subsequently everyone started hooking up with society, either through employment or marriage, and I was the only one who hadn’t done either. While I always say it’s because I’m frail, deep down everyone must be thinking that if that’s so, why would I choose to do a job in which I’m on my feet for long periods every day?

Here's the Wikipedia article for "freeter":

Freeter (フリーター furītā) is a Japanese expression for people who lack full-time employment or are unemployed, excluding housewives and students. The term originally included young people who deliberately chose not to become salary-men, even though jobs were available at the time....

If they work at all, freeters often work at convenience stores, supermarkets, fast food outlets, restaurants, and other low paying, low skill jobs....

The Japan Institute of Labor classifies freeters into three groups: the "moratorium type" that wants to wait before starting a career, the "dream pursuing type", and the "no alternative type". The moratorium type of freeter wants to enjoy life, and deliberately chooses not to join the rat race of the Japanese work environment. The dream pursuing type has specific dreams incompatible with a standard Japanese career. The no alternative type could not find a decent job before high school or university graduation in the system called "simultaneous recruiting of new graduates"...

The character in the book doesn't fit any of those 3 categories. She's someone who doesn't feel like a normal person, but feels normal as part of the entity that is the store.

ADDED: Speaking of novels by Japanese authors, the new Haruki Murakami book is out today. Here: "Killing Commendatore." That's what I'll start today. Read with me!