‘My pronouns are xe and xem’ said the name badge on the supermarket checkout person’s uniform.

And I thought, good for xem, because that wasn’t ruining grammar.

How to explain that the transgender community are doing my head in because they are stealing words? (I don’t mind them inventing new ones.)

I want to explore my anguish about this in a way that enables me to go on a journey of self-discovery, identifying the way I feel. However, I also desperately want not to offend the trans community, because if I do that I’m done for, because they are the most powerful people on the planet.

When I say they, in that context, that is the correct use of a plural pronoun. But we are losing the plural pronouns because some people insist on appropriating them for the purpose of denoting the singular.

Look, I like millions of others do not care what anyone wants to identify as. It’s none of my business. Call yourself what you like. I support you wholeheartedly in being who you want to be.

What I do mind about is the butchering of the English language. Why is this argument never deployed whenever someone is persecuted for refusing to say ‘they’ in the singular?

The primary defence should not be a religious objection. One must take a stance for correct grammar, a much nobler cause than any form of bible bashing. Never mind what poor old God intended.

What are we going to be left with if they keep on taking words away from us, to re-assign them some other meaning?

What is going to be the word we can use to specify, without confusion, the notion of multiple persons if and when ‘they’ becomes as synonymous with a single person as with two or more people?

The Catholic teacher in Ireland who was suspended for refusing to say ‘they’ in relation to one pupil is one of countless who might be penalised if we carry on allowing the meaning of words to be changed so that we cannot keep up with the latest meaning unless we are given regular briefings on what we are required to say.

The fact that ‘they/singular’ offends someone’s religious beliefs is going to be the least of it.

I’m looking at a chart of all the pronouns. It’s eight words down and five words across, so there are 40 of them here and who’s to say whether this chart is incomplete?

I’m looking at them and wondering whether instead of ve and ver we shouldn’t say tree and ter? As in ‘tree is off ter head,’ which is something you might say about me, for example.

Is this fun for anyone, making up new meanings for words, and demanding we say them, and mean them as they want us to?

Because when I see someone in the news being described as ‘they’, I want to run down the street screaming ‘The end of the world is nigh!’ Not because I believe in the Garden of Eden (which I might do) but because I believe in semantics.

If I were to leave grammar aside, and attempt to say something on the substantive issues, with trepidation, I would say only that I genuinely fear for the effect on any person of being labelled plural.

If and when I decide to join the revolution, I will opt for something beginning with z or x, rather than burden myself with the psychologically challenging idea that I am two or more people.

This cashier at the supermarket was courtesy itself. No, I don’t mean xemself, because I’m referring to the word courtesy, which by the rules of grammar must be ‘itself’ because courtesy has never been assigned a gender in this country. In France she is feminine. La politesse. What are they going to do about that? Nothing. The French won’t let them.

The cashier rang through our shopping and was so nice to us as we packed that the builder boyfriend began chatting. Silently, I prayed: ‘Please Lord, let him not offend this person pronoun-edly.’

But the builder b is not daft, nor the slightest bit prejudiced. He is capable of banter with anyone and when it is obvious words must be chosen carefully he does so. I have never been more proud of him than when he got to the end of paying for our shopping without the cashier pressing an alarm to call the supervisor.

We have a friend who once called another friend’s twenty-something child by their previous pronoun and it caused only slightly less trouble than the Suez crisis.

We wheeled our trolley out with big smiles on our faces. When we got through the door, the builder b exhaled. And I thanked poor old God.