The Danger of "It"

Pronouns and antecedents and Buzz, oh, my!

I read an article on Medium about an interview between Buzz Aldrin and an eight-year-old girl: Did Buzz Aldrin Just Admit We Never Landed on the Moon?

I want to tell you how pronouns can be dangerous, and what to do about this problem.

A pronoun, as you know, is a thing that stands in for a noun. You don't have to say I threw the ball to my friend Naomi and my friend Naomi left with the ball. You can say I threw the ball to my friend Naomi and she left with it. The pronouns it and she make the sentence easier to say and understand, shortening it¹ by a few words. But pronouns do require the reader or listener to know what you mean by them.² The antecedent, which is the noun the pronoun represents later, must be clear.

If I tell you Diane threw the ball to Naomi and she was happy, it's not clear who was happy. Is the antecedent to she Diane or Naomi?

Here's what happens with Buzz Aldrin. The girl asks him why we haven't been back to the moon in so long. His answer is lengthy, but the Medium article picks on a few sentences:

I want to know… but I think I know… because we didn’t go there, and that’s the way it happened. And if it didn’t happen, it’s nice to know why it didn’t happen, so in the future, if we want to keep doing something, we need to know why something stopped in the past that we wanted to keep it going.

We didn't go there, says Buzz, and it's nice to know why it didn't happen. The author's interpretation of this speech is:

The response, confused and word-y[sic], does emit[sic] at least one thing clearly: “It didn’t happen.”

I personally would have picked on we didn't go there, but let's work with what is offered: It didn't happen. The astute reader will already have decided that it refers to going back to the moon in so long, rather than going there in the first place. But one certainly could, with a little determination, decide that Buzz was admitting (or emitting) the “truth”: the moon landing didn't happen. One would have to ignore the part about why something stopped in the past, of course.

The author continues:

The point is that such a lie has created mass distrust in the public and divided the nation. What else could NASA be hiding from us? Could there be any truth to other theories relating to space? It’s easy to dismiss people as loonies, but when it actually gets in the way of the pursuit of facts and truth, that’s when it becomes a problem.

A little confusion about the antecedent to it has been sculpted into "proof" that NASA has been lying to us for 50 years. Suddenly, nearly every scientific theory about space is called into question. Before you know it,³ you've got a flat Earth, all from an unclear antecedent!

Here's the lesson: if you want to lower the chances of your words being twisted into something you didn't intend, make sure your antecedents are unambiguous.

1. The sentence.

2. The pronouns.

3. Or don’t know it, as the case may be.