Mystery stories are very popular with readers of all ages. As
a story of this genre unfolds, a crime is committed and we
are introduced to several possible suspects. We try to guess
which of the characters is the guilty one. Tension mounts. It
is hard to put down the story until the last chapter, when we
finally find out who committed the crime, better known as
"whodunit."
There are many life situations where we discover that things
have gone wrong and now we would like to be able to trace the
blame — another form of whodunit. Let me give you an
example. It is right before dinner time at the Cohen's house.
Mr. Cohen has arrived home twenty minutes early. While he was
waiting for his bus, a neighbor drove by and gave him a
ride.
Mr. C. sits down at the kitchen table with a pile of mail in
front of him. He plans to use his extra twenty minutes to do
some paperwork. Mrs. C. is busy cooking and, in her spare
time, also keeping track of a crawling baby, a toddler and a
three-year-old. She glances over at her husband and decides
that he is sitting in the kitchen because he wants to talk to
her. She doesn't notice the mail.
Mrs. C. decides to tell her husband about her trip into town.
"You'll never guess who I bumped into on Malachei Yisroel
Street," she says. Without waiting for a response she
continues, "Your cousin Chavie!" Mr. Cohen has been with her
thus far, but now he opens the phone bill and starts to go
over the long distance calls.
Mrs. Cohen goes on to tell about her shopping and her trip
home. She was waiting at the bus stop and met a girl of about
14. They spoke for quite a while and then Mrs. Cohen's bus
pulled up. Mrs. Cohen gathered her packages and turned to get
onto the bus. The teenager just sat there and did not help
Mrs. C. at all.
In relating this, Mrs. C.'s frustration with the teenager
causes her voice to rise. It rises so much that Mr. Cohen
decides to stop wondering who called Los Angeles for eight
minutes on April 10th and to focus his attention on his
wife's tirade. "The nerve of her! She just sat there while I
struggled with everything, and didn't even offer to help put
the carriage, Sruly, Tova or any of the parcels onto the
bus."
Mr. Cohen is too embarrassed to ask his wife who "she" in
this last sentence referred to. Before he tuned out, the
conversation had been about his wonderful, sweet young cousin
Chavie.
Could Chavie have been so callous as to let a relative, or
anyone else for that matter, board a bus with a baby carriage
three little children and a whole day's worth of shopping and
not lend a hand? A doubt will remain in Mr. C's mind whenever
he thinks of Chavie. And who is the culprit that caused this
doubt? The pronoun "she."
"She" is not the only bad guy who causes confusion and
thereby ruins relationships. "She" shares the spotlight with
"he," "they" and "it."
There is a type of literature called "stream of
consciousness" where the writer puts down anything that comes
to mind. A topic is introduced and dropped and then the
narrative goes on to something quite different. Many of us
have a similar problem when we speak. Our conversations are a
form of stream-of-consciousness.
We can be speaking of someone and all of a sudden, someone
else comes to mind. We switch then and there. That is when
the dastardly pronoun can strike. We may use "he" to refer to
three characters in a row. You don't have to tune out and
read the phone bill as Mr. Cohen did. You can be sitting
there listening to every word and not know the players
without a scorecard!
Then there is another type of conversationalist who is the
opposite of stream-of-consciousness. He or she speaks in a
form of verbal shorthand. This person speaks one terse
sentence, thinks a paragraph and then says another few
words.
The problem here is that the paragraph that was not
verbalized may be about someone quite different from the
first sentence that was spoken. In that case, the words that
follow it will not go with what was said previously. If names
are used, the listener can tell that a change has taken
place.
However, because he is addicted to brevity, the shorthand
speaker loves pronouns and uses them far more than he uses
names. There can be lots of confusion, misunderstanding and
strife—-and all because of those nasty characters she,
he, they and it.
Another person who should be barred from using pronouns is
the speaker who mumbles. Try as we might, we cannot follow
everything this person says because he seems to be speaking
more to his beard than he is to us. As he mumbles, the
listener asks, "What did you say?" or "What was that?"
Another response might be, "I'm sorry, but I didn't catch
that."
After a while, the listener gives up. S/he stops trying to
hear exactly what is being said. However, some fragments of
the conversation do get through, presenting a picture that
can be even more disjointed than that of the stream-of-
consciousness speaker or the verbal shorthand artist. If
those bits and pieces contain pronouns — watch out
below!
There is yet another type of conversation that can easily be
sabotaged by pronouns. That is conversation between members
of different generations. When we were living in California,
the teenagers there invented a form of speech called "Valley
Talk" named after the San Fernando Valley just north of Los
Angeles, a populous suburban area that has lots of teenage
residents, many of them Jewish.
In Valley Talk, most sentences begin with the word "like." A
typical example is, "Like I was going to the mallå." Parents
had no clue what their children were saying. For the teens,
that was part of the fun. If parents tried to follow their
little darlings' efforts at communication, the use of
pronouns could really wreak havoc. [lThe Israeli version is
`k'eilu', which is a probable translation of
`like.']
In a sixth grade composition about the previous summer's
vacation, a student may be relating how someone in her camp
got a leg cramp and started to drown. The writer might refer
to the swimmer, the lifeguard and the counselor who called
for help and call each of them "she," bouncing back and forth
as she goes. The teacher will circle the pronouns and write
"vague" in the margin.
But we don't write down our conversations or carry around our
grammar teachers wherever we go. We have to train
ourselves to stop composing oral whodunits. If in mid-
conversation we switch characters, we have to refer to the
newcomer by name, at least in the first usage. That won't
help someone like Mr. Cohen who tuned out early on, but it
will be an invaluable aide to those of us who try to focus
and follow what is being said.
