We must adjust: Lacey grows in stature and language evolves to include us all

Can Lacey City Manager Scott Spence predict the future?

At a Lacey Chamber of Commerce meeting last week, city manager Scott Spence delivered a State of Lacey report. He dispelled any doubt about local civic rivalries by comparing Lacey’s population with Olympia’s: Lacey is now just 1,501 short of being bigger. Lacey also has been named the 75th best place to live by Money.com. (Olympia didn’t make the list, though Spence was too polite to point that out.)

Still, even in the 75th best place, there is a housing shortage. Even with its big urban growth area, Lacey has a dwindling number of available lots for single-family homes. And like the rest of the county, it has rising rents. Lacey’s one housing bright spot is The Reserve, a 241-unit affordable apartment complex for seniors that will open this fall.

The retail sector isn’t growing much, but a gigantic Home Depot warehouse is on its way, along with a Chick-Fil-A and Taco Bell, which will replace the old Hawks Prairie Inn. But while chain stores, big-box retail and fast food tend to dominate the Lacey landscape, there also are some treasured locally owned restaurants such as Curry Corner.

And as a counterweight to all that is new, Lacey’s historic district is becoming a more prominent civic feature, anchored by a replica of an old train station.

Spence also revealed his alternate identity as “Spence-odamus.” He predicts that self-driving vehicles will become ubiquitous by 2030. He compares this to the almost total change in Manhattan from horses and buggies to cars between 1900 and 1913. Spence is quite sure that robots will soon carry packages from self-driving vehicles to our front doors. And within the next decade, he predicts that everything in our houses will be connected to the internet, and that high-resolution facial recognition and even composite fake faces will be commonplace.

Perhaps to temper the dystopian nature of some of those forecasts, he also predicts that the Mariners will win the World Series, though he was pretty vague about when.

They is on the way

Changes in the English language can be hard, particularly for those whose English teachers instilled in us a passion for proper grammar.

Some of us still cringe when we hear someone tell their dog to “go lay down,” rather than the proper “go lie down.” (We recall that the verb “to lay” requires an object.)

But we were taught both proper grammar and good manners. And the cardinal rule of good manners is to put others first, and to do for them what you would want them to do for you.

So we have to take a deep breath when grammar and manners are in conflict, as they now are in a world that’s become conscious of the feelings of people who don’t identify as either male or female. Manners trump grammar, so we need to learn to use non-gendered pronouns — even though English has inconveniently failed to give us a good option.

It takes thought and effort to get comfortable with the use of “they” and “their” as singular rather than plural pronouns.

Perhaps you’ve already made this shift, and didn’t even notice the singular dog-owner from a couple of paragraphs ago telling “their” dog what to do. Or perhaps you were never that concerned about grammar. In either case, you would probably agree that the use of “their” is a less clunky bit of language than “his or her dog.”

What’s harder to get used to is this: “They is planning to be here at 5.”

Constructions like this now come naturally to a large share of people under 40. But the trend is not confined to the young and hip. It has already become common for people to list their pronoun preferences in email signatures. Even corporate marketing agencies have caught on.

We should follow their lead. In fact, those of us who are still adjusting to this linguistic change are well over a decade behind the curve.

It just takes practice. And we can count our blessings: The use of they/them as pronouns for non-gender binary people seems to have won out over alternative gender-flexible neologisms such as zie, zim, tem and other candidates. Apparently they lost out in the competition because, like Democratic presidential nominees, there were just too many of them.

This change in our language challenges the tyranny of grammar. The prim English teachers of our past no longer make the rules. Changes that respect gender fluidity open our minds to the obvious fact that all languages evolve. Resistance is futile – and in this case, rude.