Language Prevents Some Secrets

It blows my mind that we have a plural tense. Think about this: One pound, two pounds, ten pounds, one-and-a-half pounds. The form our words take changes depending on whether there is one unit of an object or any other quantity whatsoever.

Gender is similarly strange to me. Although English is largely genderless, our pronouns very much depend on knowing the gender of the noun they replace. And when it comes to people, you are not allowed to use a genderless form.

The reason this bothers me, aside from the fact that it's stupid and unnecessary, is that it forces us to give away certain information. You cannot refer to a mystery stranger with a pronoun without divulging their gender (unless you break the rules of prescriptive grammar by using the plural "they" in reference to a singular person). You cannot refer to an unknown object without giving away whether it is one thing or several things.

Technically, that's not entirely true. You can refer to a person without betraying their gender by avoiding pronouns. and continuing to use genderless descriptions. You can mask the quantity of an object by referring to a collective group that the object is in, provided it is a group title which can actually contain only one member. But in that case, your language becomes incredibly unnatural.

If you can realize these aspects of our language and how the very structure of it determines how we can communicate and what we must communicate, it will give you the power to work around it. It may take some effort to make effective sentences that allow you to keep your secrets, but if it is a worthwhile endeavor, then do everything you can.