Hey, You! Oops, They!

'Hey, you!', the rude vernacular is so
very dated aside from being totally and
so boringly inadequate to distinguish one
from another; it is simply all too inclusive
suitable for directing at anyone at all without
distinguishing characteristics that set one
from another. Old fogies know that they
were never confused about who was a boy
and who a girl; it was a simple titillation
when one mimicked the other on occasion 
in a kind of ribald humour, a type of
street burlesque that anyone could imagine
and few took umbrage with; we were such
brats, weren't we? We shared comic books
on front stoops, played tag in the schoolyard
skated on community outdoor rinks and
rode our bicycles at breakneck speed
down hills, then clambered up trees and
went running when mothers called at
dinnertime. None of us ever dreamed of
university and so we weren't disappointed.
Our grandkids are university students and
that's so commonplace now, their opportunity
to learn so much more than we did out on
the streets, so they have their own culture 
a mystery to us where they've been taught
to embrace more gender identities than we
ever imagined existed, and feel free to alter
language in uncontested ungrammatical
conceits we find so strange, but they are
after all, also entitled and we never were.