While I'm on the topic of language and people's psychological struggles with it, I've been meaning to describe an illustrative case or two from my own life, which are not to do with gendered words.
My mom is a boomer who has tried to keep a pretty open mind about how our culture is changing with regard to gender identity, to the extent that she's able when her exposure to these cultural changes is pretty limited (which I think is the case for a lot of people as old as she is, who primarily socialize with people above 50), there's a lot she doesn't understand, and there's a lot she admits she doesn't understand and clearly genuinely doesn't make much sense to her. I think she (along with many, including young Tumblr-ish progressives) has a pretty firm feeling that the trans movement is somewhat of an echo of the gay rights movement, and she was always ahead of her time on gay rights so it feels consistent to her to at least be open-minded on trans / gender identity issues as well. She often doesn't manage to get trans people's pronouns correct, but to be fair, she doesn't get much practice, and she does make at least some sincere effort. (My dad is a somewhat grimmer story on all of this, but tonight's post isn't about him or even about trans issues really.)
But apart from the pronoun issue (and perhaps apart from the introduction of "Ms." that feminists popularized in her youth), my mom is actually really, really hostile to any kind of innovation in language.
Any perceived change from the prior default in any grammatical construction, or a variation in pronunciation within her dialect of English from the way she's spoken all her life, really viscerally and relentlessly gets under her skin. There are several examples that she brings up every visit or two I have with her (sometimes because she catches me or another family member using them, sometimes just because). I'll just mention one, which happens to come up particularly often at this time of year: it's common nowadays to say "graduated [name of school]" without a preposition, when, according to my mom, nobody used to do this, this is objectively Not Correct, you're supposed to say "graduated from [name of school]". (I suppose it's true that people rarely if ever spoke the newer, "incorrect" way while she was growing up, although I'm pretty sure I've spotted instances of "graduated" without "from" coming from a good few decades ago, so it can't be a super recent innovation even if it's only recently become the default.) Every single time she hears "graduated" without the "from", it really really irritates her.
Again, there are several other similar trends that she opposes with a similar vehemence that I won't list here.
I find this staunch and purist prescriptivist stance completely irrational, but it seems like a hopeless endeavor ever to argue with my mom about it. The dialog doesn't go exactly like as follows, but this is the gist of what appears to be her attitude on it: "Why do you say it's Objectively Bad to say such-and-such?" "Because it's Objectively Incorrect, and it's bad to use words incorrectly!" "But what makes it Objectively Incorrect?" "Because it's not the way the words used to be used!" Any point about how language is always changing decade by decade, century by century, and how with the changes in how people actually speak come changes in what is Correct and Incorrect, seems to be lost on her. In the case of "graduated [from?]", one can illustrate this especially well: I actually pointed out to her that her way of using "graduate" -- that is, saying "I graduated from [name of school]" -- was once an innovation! Early in the 20th century, as far as I understand, the "correct" way to use that verb was to make its subject the school (or the people working at the school), and to make the graduate the object of the verb, as in "[name of school] graduated me", or else one could use a passive construction: "I was graduated from [name of school]". Eventually people started making the graduate the subject of a non-passive use of the verb -- in other words, they removed the "was". (This was actually first brought to my attention in an SSC comment some years ago.) When I brought this up to her, she waved it aside by saying that she never knew of a time when the only correct construction was "[school] graduated me" or "I was graduated from [school]", and if her parents started out using only those constructions, well, they never corrected her or objected to her saying "I graduated from [school]", so it couldn't have been a significant departure from what was normal.
In other words, the only logical conclusion I can reach from my mom's convictions is that the Eternally Objectively Correct use of standard-dialect American English is whatever was the norm among what was exposed to those happened to be growing up in the 1950's and 1960's, and anything else will always and forever be wrong.
My sibling has tried arguing with her by championing descriptivism as an alternative, but I can't say I entirely agree with that either. My stance is that we should notice innovations in current use of our language and go along with it if and only if we feel they're good or neutral innovations, so resist and push back on them if we judge them to be degrading our language in some way. To my thinking, while leaving out "from" after "graduate" seems like a slightly sloppy shortcut at first blush, there's nothing objectively detrimental to the structure and flavor of English if we let this one verb take direct objects (again) instead of requiring a prepositional phrase to be attached to it when specifying the school. On the other hand, I hate the fact that our verbal tense system is being eroded by frequent popular replacement of our past unreal subjunctive tense by a past conditional (e.g. "I wish I wouldn't have done such-and-such" instead of "I wish I hadn't done such-and-such"), so I resist and (at least in principle, in my mind) push back against it.
My mom also really hates anything that goes against the grammar books when the usage listed as correct is clearly supported by logic, a good example being using "me" after "and" when it's part of the subject of a sentence: if you wouldn't use "me" without the conjunction, then you shouldn't use it with the conjunction. This is despite the fact that, as far as I know, Modern English speakers over the centuries never actually consistently spoke in this "correct" way, so she's not doing a particularly good job of prescriptivism here. On a basic level, I'm with my mom on this, but I acknowledge that John McWhorter does have some very sophisticated arguments in defense of "[subject] and me" that my mom absolutely will not hear. (My dad is where I inherit most of my rationalist traits, but my carefulness with verbal and written precision in a non-mathematical context, together with my preoccupation over logical underpinnings for linguistic conventions, absolutely comes from my mom and not my dad.)
To myself (and probably occasionally in Tumblr posts), I use the term "linguistic sensitivity" to refer to a bundle of aversions involving language which include these absolutely vexing, intense, insistent, under-the-skin negative psychological sensations from certain uses of grammar and certain pronunciations that my mom has. (There's probably a better succinct phrase referring to this psychological quirk; I'm terrible at coming up with good terminology.) This is of importance to me especially because I think I'm the same way. That is, I've either inherited or had inculcated in me a variant of this "linguistic sensitivity".
To give an example of my sensitivity, my College Ex seemingly decided fairly abruptly, a couple of years into college (during the time we were in a relationship), to start pronouncing the name of the high school we had gone to together in what I'm like 1000% sure is an incorrect fashion that absolutely nobody else I'd ever encountered out of the many hundreds involved in some way with the school had ever used. (I don't want to describe what it is because I'm shy about revealing certain autobiographical things like the name of my high school, but she insisted on pronouncing one consonant in way that is contrary not only to the obvious national origin of the surname used for the high school but contrary to just about every Roman alphabet -using language on the face of the earth except for a single non-obscure one where that consonant would never appear in that phonetic position.) I don't think she pronounced it that way back when we were still going to the school or had just left it; I think her switch was fairly abrupt, but she absolutely insisted that that was how it had been pronounced all along, only ever claiming as evidence something she'd heard on a non-professionally-made audio recording that was played to her in band class. I was pretty timid about bringing it up to her, at least relative to how deeply it annoyed me. It really didn't help that her way of responding was extremely derisive. I think she even used the R word* to me about it? Like it was so obvious that our high school was pronounced this way, if only I'd just listened back when I was there!
*I'm sure today she'd be ashamed of her frequent use of the R word to deride things she thought dumb. I mustn't be too self-righteous: it hadn't yet been collectively decided among sensitive liberal people that the word was generally offensive back in the mid-'00's, and although I remember it bothering me whenever I heard it in any context of "this is dumb", this was one of only very few linguistic points of social progress that I was actually ahead of my time on.
My then-gf got several other completely illogically backed mispronunciations of names lodged into her head during the time we were together and absolutely refused to hear corrections to those as well. (E.g., this didn't bother me at quite the level of mispronouncing the name of our high school, but there was a professor, Russian and well-known in the community, whose last name was Irchai which she insistently and emphatically began pronouncing as "EER-shuh" -- the schwa in the second syllable not just when she was swallowing it while speaking quickly, but when putting some weight on the whole name. Only French and Portuguese soften <ch> and of course their words aren't Romanized from a different alphabet; not a single language in the whole world pronounces <ai> as a schwa in any word; and as far as I could tell nobody else called him that -- my gf's mother knew him and pronounced his name correctly with the last syllable as in the drink chai. I think you can tell by how much I go on about this stuff that it still grinds my gears to look back on!) And part of my point in describing my ex's extremely dismissive, almost defensive, reaction to my timidly calling her pronunciations into question is to suggest that she had some form of "linguistic sensitivity" of her own! Somehow some wires had gotten crossed in her brain regarding pronunciations of certain names, and she became really hostile to any attempt by someone else to correct them, and her way of reacting was to make out that the correcting person was just being really dumb and unobservant.
Anyway, I cannot overstate just how much this habit of my College Ex's deeply, intensely, irrepressibly irritated me. As in, if I had to answer the cliche question of "What little habit of your partner annoys you the most?", it would clearly have to be this (although when she actually asked me the question, the answer I chose to give was "leaving your chewed gum on the rim of my drinking glass"). I didn't make an Actual Thing of it because I knew how irrational I was being. Seriously, just mispronouncing the name of a school we no longer attended, or a professor I had maybe met only once, got to me that much? I knew it was my own problem to get over. But try as I might, I didn't know how to avoid experiencing an almost physical barely-contained-micro-rage clenched-up response every single time she mentioned our high school around me (which was probably on nearly a daily basis).
Anyway, I guess you could say this cluster of aversions is an idiosyncrasy that probably many of us have in one way or another. And it may not entirely be based in rationality, it's arguably pretty irrational altogether, but it is a kind of important thing to acknowledge when we discuss the level of difficulty that we might collectively have with abruptly overhauling deeply-ingrained basic aspects of our language because of social changes, and why the kind of complete dismissal of that difficulty that I somewhat frequently hear is going to be alienating to many.
