During Sandiego Comic Con, a new trailer for Sony Pictures' Venom hit the waves and ho boy does this film have some amazing writing.
"The guy you work for is the evil person!"
When this line happened I had a jolly good chuckle with my Palscast regulars. Three months on though, I haven't stopped thinking about why it's so funny. What's going on to make this line's verbiage sound so awkward?
First, it's a sentence that switches formality of speech. The first time Eddie Brock mentions his boss, he uses the informal "guy". The second, the more formal "person". While English grammar doesn't demand specific forms depending who you're speaking to, switching modes can be awkward. It makes Eddie sound like he's being fed lines by an alien. Of course, this is before he's been infected with the alien parasite so you can't even give a diegetic reason for this to be the case. A better flowing sentence for formality and tone would simply be "The guy you work for is evil!" Or even "Your boss is evil!"
With those suggestions in mind, why even use the world "person?" The answer there is... less grammatical in nature. Venom is a film intended to reach as wide an audience as possible. It's an entertainment product whose goal is to make money.As a result, it wants to make as many people feel comfortable as it can. In the year 2018 there is an increase in awareness of the difference between socially constructed gender and biological sex. Accounting for this means a steady shift towards pronouns that indicate a sentence's subject or object is human without specifying gender. This film currently has four (five, according to this current Wikipedia edit)
writers and I can only guess that at least one of them wanted to show the audience that they're aware of such a linguistic shift. That, or it was an expectation from someone involved with the project who has money. No matter the cause, I think it's pretty clear that someone wanted to make sure the audience is aware that they're aware that gender neutral forms of address are A Thing.
From here, there's a layer of awkwardness that combines both the new form of address and the formality issue together: there's not really an informal gender neutral pronoun. For men, English has words such as "guy, dude, bro, fella, bloke". For women there's "gal, chick, lass, sheila, wench" and so on. That most of those have unfortunate implications is a topic for another time, but my point stands. How do you refer to something being a human without specifying gender? Person is just about the only option.
Languages change in all sorts of weird ways over time. Words increase in length. Words get shorter. How words are pronounced changes. Sometimes they're just replaced with completely unrelated phonemes for no real reason. I gave a solution to this specific example when I used the title of "boss". That doesn't solve this issue in the long-term.
With that in mind, I have a fix for Sony's awkward line that maintains the original structure. Since Eddie Brock is the one who's highlighted this gap in vocabulary, I'll make a monosyllabic word derived from his name. To avoid confusion with other English words, I'll grab a consonant that's not already tied to a word that rhymes with "Brock". Thus I present to you all, the word "vock" (pronounced vɔk). It's a third person noun usable as a pronoun for any humans whose gender you cannot or do not wish to specify. Indication of plural simply requires adding the suffix s.
First, it's a sentence that switches formality of speech. The first time Eddie Brock mentions his boss, he uses the informal "guy". The second, the more formal "person". While English grammar doesn't demand specific forms depending who you're speaking to, switching modes can be awkward. It makes Eddie sound like he's being fed lines by an alien. Of course, this is before he's been infected with the alien parasite so you can't even give a diegetic reason for this to be the case. A better flowing sentence for formality and tone would simply be "The guy you work for is evil!" Or even "Your boss is evil!"
With those suggestions in mind, why even use the world "person?" The answer there is... less grammatical in nature. Venom is a film intended to reach as wide an audience as possible. It's an entertainment product whose goal is to make money.As a result, it wants to make as many people feel comfortable as it can. In the year 2018 there is an increase in awareness of the difference between socially constructed gender and biological sex. Accounting for this means a steady shift towards pronouns that indicate a sentence's subject or object is human without specifying gender. This film currently has four (five, according to this current Wikipedia edit)
writers and I can only guess that at least one of them wanted to show the audience that they're aware of such a linguistic shift. That, or it was an expectation from someone involved with the project who has money. No matter the cause, I think it's pretty clear that someone wanted to make sure the audience is aware that they're aware that gender neutral forms of address are A Thing.
From here, there's a layer of awkwardness that combines both the new form of address and the formality issue together: there's not really an informal gender neutral pronoun. For men, English has words such as "guy, dude, bro, fella, bloke". For women there's "gal, chick, lass, sheila, wench" and so on. That most of those have unfortunate implications is a topic for another time, but my point stands. How do you refer to something being a human without specifying gender? Person is just about the only option.
Languages change in all sorts of weird ways over time. Words increase in length. Words get shorter. How words are pronounced changes. Sometimes they're just replaced with completely unrelated phonemes for no real reason. I gave a solution to this specific example when I used the title of "boss". That doesn't solve this issue in the long-term.
With that in mind, I have a fix for Sony's awkward line that maintains the original structure. Since Eddie Brock is the one who's highlighted this gap in vocabulary, I'll make a monosyllabic word derived from his name. To avoid confusion with other English words, I'll grab a consonant that's not already tied to a word that rhymes with "Brock". Thus I present to you all, the word "vock" (pronounced vɔk). It's a third person noun usable as a pronoun for any humans whose gender you cannot or do not wish to specify. Indication of plural simply requires adding the suffix s.
The guy we work for is the evil vock.
Yeah... conscious language changes take getting used to.
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