Who do they think they are?

GRAMMAR HAS rarely produced as much public acrimony as in the battle over pronouns being waged around the world. In one skirmish in 2015, the University of Tennessee offered guidance on referring to non-binary students on its website, only for political blowback to lead to a legislative ban on spending public money to support non-traditional pronouns. Jordan Peterson, a controversial Canadian academic, has refused to use invented pronouns or “they” in relation to people who identify as neither male nor female. Many fulminating commentators spy political correctness running amok yet again.

Into the breach comes a useful corrective in the form of Dennis Baron’s well-timed new book, “What’s Your Pronoun?” Mr Baron is a linguist at the University of Illinois, and a longtime scholar of a curious gap in the English language. For centuries, people have wrestled with the fact that there is no uncontroversial pronoun to refer to a subject of unknown, indeterminate or mixed gender.