“But at the same time, in a great many sentences of your wonderful post, you don’t manage to make subject and verb agree.”
This is actually how my mind works. Which explains why I’ve never had a best selling novel!
But I figure if I get the idea out there then b people like yourself will articulate it to others better than I can. So please do feel free to build on this and call it your own. The message is more important than the messenger.
This is actually how my mind works. Which explains why I’ve never had a best selling novel!
I can't agree. You're a writer of rare gifts. Your preview here struck me as the introduction to a book of social commentary and entertaining story-telling, rather than a novel. But you might find that for you, it would be easier to spin out a novel-like narrative, during the course of which absurdities and realities on this bizarre sensitivity are explored and exploded. (It could sell a lot of copies in brown paper bags to people who don't want to be caught and canceled.)
Your brilliantly direct articulation of the key concept--that the beholder, not the beheld, is the rightful judge of the beheld's public identity--is the hammer hitting the perfect nail on the head, perfectly. It's invisibly obvious, like the Emperor's nakedness. Most people couldn't have put it into words.
In my note above, I was the one with the error: I got scrambled in my terminology. It's a mismatch, not between subject and verb, but between two pronouns in the same sentence, which the linguistic Stalinists are trying to foist on us normals. Here's an example, using a simple opinion of mine: "Someone who refers to themselves as the sex they aren't is doing something laughable, and should periodically be laughed at."
Okay, translating that bit of word-salad into English--not using the linguistic demands of the Stalinists--one has two options.
1) Using the generic masculine: "Someone who refers to himself as the sex he isn't is doing something laughable. . ." 2) Or referring to such tranny nutcases as a group: "People who refer to themselves as the sex they aren't. . ." etc.
Stalinists spread and enforce intentional bits of ideologically based illiteracy in order to intimidate and undermine the culture, and sanity itself. Then they like to hear the innocent victims trip over themselves in the effort to use the new, "mandatory" way of speaking.
We need to resist and deride their coercive chatter whenever possible.