Let it never be said that Baltimore-based Daily Beast contributor Kyndall Cunningham is any kind of woke pronoun dilletante. She is in fact totally hardcore, and not just in her sentences but her headlines.
The latest example is a Cunningham/Beast story about poor, crazy Ezra Miller, who’s been flaming out for a while now. Here’s the headline:
My first response was “yo…brave Kyndall!…set the standards, blaze a trail!” Would the N.Y. Times, the Washington Post or the Daily Guardian run such a headline? Perhaps not, but this shouldn’t be Kyndall’s concern. For she appears to be the first woke soldier over the wire, our very own Sgt. Alvin York…clenched teeth, fixed bayonet….Ezra Miller is not only non-binary, but he may contain multitudes…he’s a community of souls within a single body…aarrggghhh!
The last time HE considered Cunningham’s history-altering use of woke gender pronouns in a news story was just over two months ago (4.8.22). In an article called “Pronoun Monsters on Maple Street,” I went into cardiac arrest over a Cunningham sentence written for a Daily Beast piece about Miller’s shenanigans.
Here’s the sentence:
HE reaction: I know this sounds abrupt but all of a sudden the pronoun thing — a re-ordering of the English language due to political activism on the part of one-half of 1% of the population, and driven by an attempt to show respect and establish boundaries that will benefit the ambiguous gender-fluid community — strikes me as fundamentally INSANE, or at least in this context.
Say it loud and proud: We cannot and must not use they/them to refer to an individual and a group of people within a single sentence.
Let’s not forget how Cunningham hit the roof last March when Power of the Dog director Jane Campion praised Venus and Serena Williams in the wrong way at the Spirit Awards. Nobody outside of Cunningham’s deranged woke enclave gave a shit, but she sure flipped out!
