The word ‘they’ has two legitimate uses and one illegitimate use. The first proper and legitimate use is as the subjective case of the third person plural pronoun – that is, to refer to a bunch of people. The second is as a singular pronoun in cases where it is impossible to know the gender of the person referred to, for example: ‘If someone wins the lottery they should…’ In such cases, and only in such cases, it is proper to use ‘they’ just as ‘you’ has been employed for centuries – covering both singular and plural. However, it is improper, illegitimate and totally appalling to use ‘they’ as a singular pronoun when the gender is known. This has been done, apparently, by Northlakes High School in NSW. At that school, the boys’ toilet has a sign saying ‘He/They’ and the girls’ toilet one saying ‘She/They.’ This is wrong on so many fronts it’s hard to know where to begin. For a start, toilets are not normally labelled with pronouns – they are labelled ‘mens’ (or ‘gents’) and ‘womens’ (or ‘ladies’). In a school context this becomes ‘boys’ and ‘girls’. Switching to a pronoun for labelling is nonsense. Worse, the gender is known. Males go to boys’ toilets and females go to girls’ toilets – so the use of ‘they’ to be gender neutral is a bit of hard-left Marxist ideological madness. And third, this is dangerous. Mark Latham has pointed out that these lunatic woke signs may encourage boys to use the girls’ toilets – meaning little 12- and 13-year-old girls could find themselves in a toilet with perving 17- and 18-year-old boys. It is outrageous that a principal could assume the power to impose politically correct stupidity on a whole school (without – as it happens – telling parents or seeking their permission). Madness. Dangerous madness.

The lexicographers at Merriam-Webster say the death of the Queen caused the word ‘colonialism’ to be one of the most looked-up words on their website – driven by such things as this headline from Time magazine: ‘Queen Elizabeth II’s Death is a Chance to Examine the Present Effects of Britain’s Colonial Past.’ The Oxford defines ‘colonialism’ as: ‘The principle, policy, or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country and occupying it with settlers.’ Wittgenstein famously said that the meaning of a word is its use in the language – and it seems to me that ‘colonialism’ is used these days as a ‘sneer word’: meaning that anything that is associated with ‘colonial’ is assumed to be bad. There are certainly bleak and bad things that came from establishing a British colony in Australia – but the picture is more mixed than that. Among other things (the rule of law, science, democracy, etc) British settlement brought a written language, now the national language. Prior to settlement there were over 250 different language and cultural groups across Australia. And none of them had a system of writing. The problem with treating ‘colonialism’ as nothing more than a negative is that it falls into the trap of seeing history through a lens of resentment. Nelson Mandela once wisely said: ‘Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemies.’

With most words we never know who coined them, but in the case of ‘meme’ we know exactly who and when. ‘Meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. The Oxford defines a ‘meme’ as: ‘A cultural element or behavioural trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (esp. imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene.’ The word is very popular on social media (that alone should warn us against it – when they talk about ‘passing on memes’ we should suspect they are talking nonsense). And the whole notion has been roundly criticised by some pretty smart people. British political philosopher John Gray has characterized Dawkins’ memetic theory of religion as ‘nonsense’ and ‘not even a theory… the latest in a succession of ill-judged Darwinian metaphors…’ Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr disapproved of Dawkins’s gene-based view and usage of the term ‘meme’, asserting it to be an ‘unnecessary synonym’ for the word ‘concept’, which means an idea of something.  And ‘concepts’ get passed between people – mostly through language. The notion that ‘concepts’ should be called ‘memes’ – and that they get passed on from one generation to the next like genes, strikes me as a total failure to understand the richness and flexibility of human culture.