NEWS THOU CANST USE: Whatever Happened to “You”?  English sorely lacks a distinction that’s common in other languages. We once used “thou” for the singular, but by the 17th century “you” became common for both the singular and plural (unless thou wert a Quaker). People have kept coming up with new ways to make this useful distinction, like “y’all” and “youse” and Pittsburghers’ “yinz” (derived from “you ones”). But none of them has become standard, the linguist John McWhorter explains, because “their class associations are especially strong, and are felt by pretty much all of the population rather than by just a few pedants.”

English without “thou” has a ding in it. You can likely recall times when you have had to say something amid a group, like “You need to make sure — I mean you all, not just you, Jocelyn — that we make contact with them before Monday.” No one had to pause for little fixes like that when speaking Old or Middle English. It’s a design flaw in the modern language.

And yet notice that no one seems terribly concerned. In contrast to endless attempts to create a brand-new gender-neutral pronoun, such as “ze” or my favorite one, dating all the way back to 1879, “hesh,” there seems to be no push to create a plural “you” pronoun that doesn’t have the class associations of “y’all” and the like. We just accept that in this regard English is pitilessly, eternally and peculiarly unclear.

There is, actually, a lesson in that. If it’s OK that standard English can’t readily distinguish between the singular and plural “you,” then what determines which aspects of our language we single out for criticism and attempt to fix? If we don’t need “thou,” then why all of the agita about using “literally” in a figurative way, when in that case, unlike with “you,” context almost always makes clear what the meaning is without any need for repair? Why sweat about the insouciant redundancy of “irregardless”? Why insist on retaining something as confounding and ongoingly misused as that “lay” is both how you make something “lie” and also the past tense of “lie”? This is the result of an unintended train crash between two words that sounded much less alike 1,000 years ago — but last time I checked we were supposed to keep the distinction going irre— sorry, regardless.

To wit, in the grand scheme of things, what happened in English is an object lesson in how imperfect all languages are, and that this imperfection is both inevitable and harmless. We like our English “you” just the way it is and dismiss all attempts to change it, even though it only got that way because of a creeping notion that everybody should be, as it were, holier than thou. Few things better demonstrate how we can learn to stop worrying and love our language.

Personally, I’m still rooting for a separate plural. Yinz have any opinions?