Brothers! Sisters! I speak to you today of a grave malady. A plague that infects the very life-blood of our proud and resilient trade. It penetrates the impermeable, corrupts the incorrigible and lingers around the job site like a snake, ready to infect the brains and speech-centers of every electrician. Few comprehend the nature of this…unwholesome condition…fewer still know its cause. Its cure, a hopeless mystery. And there you go about your business, spreading along the way. What are you going on about? An ailment? Who’s sick? Oh, dear reader! I’ve heard you on the job giving orders, laying out, instructing, clarifying, collaborating, offering your diagnosis for this and that problem, and everything you say indicates your abject infection. And you’re far from alone: your apprentice, your foreman, her foreman and his, too…even – indeed! – our beloved at the hall – everyone plagued!
Stop snickering. I’m not deranged. The flood of pronouns that spew ceaselessly from your mouths is indicative of what doctors (well, one, anyway) call, pronounamania, an uncontrollable urge to replace useful words with pronouns, often to the unmitigated detriment of clarity. Yes – pronouns! “Over here. Right there. That thing goes on this thing. Take that conduit, go around that box over there by that thing (thing: vague and useless, yes, but not a pronoun) and bring it up and over here…thhhaaaaaaaat…way it can feed this one, here.
The effects of pronouns vary depending on electrician, but the results are always disastrous. Correct: it, he, she, they, them, their, there, her, his, who, which, here, and over there are fine and dandy in the employ of the skilled interlocutor. But from the mouth of the careless, pronouns go forth with the indiscriminate lethality of a cluster strike, accidentally deployed from a fighter-jet bouncing along the underside of earth’s upper atmosphere, piloted by a trainee, who asks…“Did we lose something?”
You’ll know when you come across the aftermath of a pronoun carpet-bombing. Apprentices spin in tight circles with heads arched ceiling-wise, mouths ajar, eyes fixated on an inadvisably-planned conduit run, deciding whether to confront their journeyman with yet more questions or, surrender their fate to the toss of a coin: what did he mean by here? When the JW said this one, did he mean that or this? Journeymen, ever the model of productivity, form pockets of idle tools and gossipy lips and, one-by-one, sojourn to the bathroom – that refuge of quiet contemplation – hopeful to ascertain the foreman’s meaning of this, that and there.
Pronouns! – anything but the happy literary devices your grammar teacher said they were. Sure – pronouns eliminate redundancy so a writer needn’t burden readers with an endless repetition of nouns. Yes: we use them everyday in nearly every context. Indeed: with pronouns, “Donny is a blowhard, and Donny writes shamelessly sloppy prose because Donny was born on Mars,” becomes, “Donny is a magisterial writer who creates scintillating prose because he was born in the vicinity of Olympus.” But in our line of work, the only good pronoun is the one we leave unstated.
Sisters! Brothers! I hereby declare the end of the pronoun’s ruinous reign. Vague. Unspecific. Utterly useless claptrap, no help in building sophisticated systems of electrical awesomeness. We electricians are too good for pronouns. Stop using pronouns. Use specific, tedious, overly-helpful words and phrases such as, The 4-inch rigid conduit feeding Cabinet A-1; Box B directly adjacent to the 50kv transformer labeled XMFR-B. And so on.
By eliminating pronouns you, too, can stamp out pronoun malady for good. The electrical trade is depending on you.