This is beautiful. Guess what? Dictionaries understand dictionaries.
By the way, the @smarick fellow seems to be taking this smack upside the head in good grace, but it’s amazing to me how many people are furious at the notion of using “they” as a singular pronoun.
Would those people who are most furious happen to be about thirty years behind the curve on other cultural matters too?
Anyone who thinks that “they” must be plural, they have their head in their ass.
Rich Woods @1 “Would those people who are most furious happen to be about thirty years behind the curve on other cultural matters too?”
More like a century or ten.
Agreed about them being at least thirty years behind, I remember in grade school in the ’80s being told that “they” was the appropriate singular pronoun to use in English when you didn’t know which one to use.
Either that, or they are living in the 1950’s or earlier, and are unable to comprehend their knowledge is sixty years or more in the past. It is too trite to cue the theme to the Twilight Zone.
OK, then how about we get rid of gendered pronouns entirely? I have the sneaking suspicion that Andy would blow a head-gasket at that suggestion.
Nothing separates us from animals. We are animals.
Speaking with the contempt of an asshole arrogant enough to be honest, I’d be perfectly happy to identify unidentified or undifferentiated nominative subjects as “it”‘s. If anyone objects, it should explain in detail why.
— TWZ
Great, now will someone please hammer this point into my family members’ brains?
So long as “you” can be used as a singular and plural address, “they” should be included as well. I’ve been using it much of my life when appropriate. And of course German uses the plural forms too at times.
We must stand firm against corruption of our language that occurred at least 6 centuries ago.
I’ve taken to using “they” but shaping sentences in a way that avoids verbs that change depending on if singular or plural is used.
However, I’ve stressed over it so much now that every pronoun looks weird. Gaddfern it, English.
I’m casting my vote with colonelzen for “it” or some other non-gendered singular. I would far rather lose the “personal”/”impersonal” distinction for pronouns than the singular/plural. I do a fair bit of technical writing and unless I’m using named agents (Alice/she, Bob/he, etc), I always prefer to use “it” for everything. After all, my agents (users, attackers, etc.) could just as easily be autonomous programs as people. I’ve never seen anyone seriously propose to assign genders to programs and robots, and the distinction between what roles are performed by people vs. software is only going to blur further as time progresses.
Sure, “you” is both singular and plural in modern usage, but its use frequently requires disambiguation that would not be required if the you/thou distinction had not been lost. For instance, when addressing a group, some other plural is injected to clarify and when addressing a single person out of a group, it is generally necessary to name the person before using “you”. For instance, “Did you folks enjoy the cake?” and “Alice, did you enjoy the cake?”. Losing the singular/plural distinction for third-person pronouns would cause even more ambiguity which we don’t currently have a good way to resolve. For instance, “Alex drove Kelly home. Then they went to the store.”. Who went to the store? Where is Kelly? How would you modify the second sentence to clarify short of not using pronouns at all?
If he wants to be upset about something how about the misuse of awarded in car ads. I keep seeing car ads describing something as “the most awarded,” where they mean it’s won the most awards, not that it’s the vehicle that’s been given to the most people as a prize.
Even though I advocate “they” for an ungendered pronoun, I prefer it to “it”; as “it” can also be applied to a non-living object. “They”, at least, makes it clear a person is being referred to, while “it” can apply to just about anything.
IF a grammar war is about to start, I prefer to fight about apostrophes being misapplied. The possessive form of “it” is “its”. apostrophe would be used to shorten “it is”.
slithey tove, riverbed pebbles are rounded because they become polished and smoothed due abrasion from water flows and tumbling.
The use of “they” as a singular pronoun is now seen as acceptable by some grammar experts in some cases. It still sounds wrong to the ear of some of us old fogies.
Nothing I can do about that except try to avoid using it myself. I use he or she when I can and if not change the construction of the sentence. Don’t see any reason for attacking someone for that but I’m sure there will be some attacks from the usual quarters. If memory serves, first “he” was always correct, then a variety of s/he, etc. ,then “she” was always correct and now it’s they.
According to this site “they” used as the an indefinite someone is not correct in formal usage.
http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/01/they-2.html
“What’s indisputably true is that anyone who uses “they,” “them,” or “their” to refer to an indefinite someone is using English that’s casual and informal, if not incorrect. In formal, grammatically correct English, these are third person plural pronouns.”
I don’t think we need to look for nefarious motives for not liking the construction. Well, most of us don’t.
Ah,hold everything. I take it back. I just read about how the “he or she” usage does not include those who do not accept the gender binary. A good reason I guess for using “they” more often. I know this is well known to many here but I am just catching up to the transgender phenomenon. There was an article in the New Yorker about a transsexual who wished to be called “they”. I think I understand that better now.
Sent from my iPad
It’s ridiculous to see anyone under 40 actually campaigning against this particular feature. Singular they is practically normative, and it’s certainly been used without any conscious politicization since the 1970s – at that’s just from publications. People were probably saying it earlier.
My background is linguistics and I would like very much to explain the idea that singular “they” has nothing whatsoever to do with not wanting to sound sexist, that is, it should be understood that singular ‘they’ never came about for the purpose of having an ungendered pronoun, but for the purpose of rectifying a gap in the paradigm for indefinite singular pronouns. The often repeated prescriptive use of “his or her” “him or her” “he or she” is not a pronoun, it’s a phrase functioning as a pronoun. Linguistically speaking such a creature does not live very long at all, and if it weren’t a plural form stretching over to include singular meaning, we would have expected at the least a determiner to form out of the complex phrases people were forced to use, perhaps “hishe” or “hiser” – but for various reasons, this was less natural sounding to English speakers than the “they” alternative. There was, of course, originally a functional third person indefinite pronoun, “one”, but once it dropped out of normal discourse, it left a gap speakers have had a rough time (about a century’s worth) replacing. It shouldn’t be missed that singular “they” was originally a North American English phenomenon, and that “one” lasted longer or in places has continued use in Britain, NZ, Aus.
Why was it a plural third person form used in this way and not another, say the second person? The second person was in fact appropriated for this use: “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand these instructions.” There was a point where it appeared in many of the same places singular “they” appears, but the two have since come to occupy slightly different semantics.
As for why a plural form, this is mainly because singular-plural indexing across VPs already has a history of ambiguity in English. Complex disjunctive DPs are often mistaken to be plural – and I say mistaken lightly, because it is perfectly reasonable to analyze it as plural for the speakers who use it that way:
It’s long been the case – prescriptively even, to use singular “they” in such phrasing as “either of them”, as it is in “all of them”, despite there being a clear semantic difference in plurality between the determiner “either” and the determiner “all”. It is natural to expect such ambiguity to branch out into other constructions, until we now today have all the uses we do for singular “they”. How do we know this has happened? Because we now hear the third sentence above “either of them are”, where the verb has been re-analyzed as plural when the speaker is clearly intending singular meaning, which is the case with other uses of singular “they” – it always takes a plural verb. This is called re-analysis, and it’s a beautiful thing.
Has this sort of thing happened before, in English, with pronouns? YES, yes it has. We used to have two second person pronouns. “Thou/thee/thy” were singular, and “You/you/your” were plural. These of course were not always what they looked like (the plural subject used to sound like “ye” and not like “you”, for one), but let’s use these early modern forms by way of exmaple. There was a period in English where under French influence you got a split in function of these pronouns. You could no longer use “thou” and its derviatives for singular meaning without implying an air of familiarity. It had become the “informal” form. There was a gap for an all-purpose second singular, and it was filled by the second person plural forms. In manuscripts we even sometimes see “you is” before the verb gets rounded out to plural as well. “You, my lovely aunt, are spry as ever.” This is a plural form through and through, appropriated for the singular. This sort of thing happens fucking constantly.
The thing people have to remember about language change is it happens gradually. Speakers do have to “accept” it on an individual basis, but the real process goes something like this: a feature passes between enough speakers, usually by mistake, but sometimes also to complete gaps in paradigms, that a new generation assumes it is standard when they hear the infected speakers use it before the uninfected. The children are now infected and use it with their children. Eventually it will either die out or become widespread enough some fool calls it “standard”. This is the typical routine with any and all language change since the beginning of speech on Earth. All change is in essence mistake. Speakers get separated from their elders, or from their original communities by mountain ranges or migration, they immitate the speech of individuals they like, they experience slight misperceptions in pronounciation, etc. But whatever that mistake may be, all change follows the universals of language. All of it is natural, and all of it happens for a scientifically valid reason.
If we want, however, to talk about more recent forms which for many English speakers do not yet feel natural, there are some and these have come about as forms of singular “they”, no less. In the next few decades, perhaps more, we’ll see certain of them either die out or become widely accepted. What I’m referring to are singular they reflexives/intensives in both the canonically plural:
and a nonce hybrid form most often seen in VPs with specifically singular verb forms unlike above that has a plural verb form in that VP:
These, as well as alternative theirself/theirselves, are heard constantly but are still edited out of prescriptivist media wherever it isn’t being used “dialectally” for a particular character’s dialogue.
Singular “they” has won, it’s really truly standard for English speaking populations, at least in North America, and it originally never had anything to do with not wanting to sound sexist. The most we can see sexism at work in it is in the latter stages of infection in a media culture, where even the words we use become stumping objects put before committees, but this is a very minor and ultimately insignificant part of the process. But forms like “themselves/themself/theirselves/theirself” represent the flux of another gap in the paradigm, and we’ll soon see it sorted out as well. If you want to see language at work, keep an eye on them.
I’m not sure Smarick’s series of single word sentences is old-rule-friendly. And I guess he’s a language traditionalist, decrying a long-performed grammatical use of “they”, but being such a traditionalist, why did he spell “affront” with those two big Ss?
TLDR – the idea that humans consciously decide the course of their languages take is pure and utter bunkum, and only the most out of touch English majors believe in it.
We need a new gender-neutral pronoun and they makes the most sense to me.
That isn’t language, but calligraphy and later typography. And when that long-s was in use, the contemporaneous “f” looked distinct from it.
Akira, #6:
I briefly messed with lojban, which was ostensibly intended to create a syntactically unambiguous language with no cultural presuppositions. I lost interest after pointing out that it included terms for man, woman, boy, girl, husband, wife, etc., and recommended that they be replaced with person, adult, child, and partner, forcing the speaker to compound it when desired to make male-type person, female-type person, etc.
The lojban wonks went Vulcan on me, and insisted that it was a notational convenience only and involved no cultural assumptions. So apparently the whole project is a failure.
@smarick has a point. When I grew up, we never took liberties with the eternal rules of grammar. We used to take pride in our language, and never corrupted it through the sloppy use of “they” as a generic non-gendered pronoun, and wouldn’t think of ending every word in a sentence with a full stop for emphasis. Kids these days have no self respect. #offamylawnyoupunks
I’m 59. What am I?
taraskan, !
I found yours a most excellent exposition. Thanks.
You bloody ‘murikan isolationists have NO RESPECT for the effort it takes ESL people to grasp the arcana of English grammatical rules, only then to have the “rule(s)” change in midstream. They have enough trouble with verb-subject agreement as it is. Or is it now “they has”?
… says an individual coming from a first language whose formal personal pronoun is nondeterminative as to number but always takes a verbform that is identical to (but according to the rules isn’t) the plural verbform, even when unambiguously-due-to-context referring to the singular.
hotspurphd wrote:
I doubt you’re that old. Even the 1611 English translations of the Christian bible used singular they quite often: http://englishbibles.blogspot.ca/2006/09/singular-they-in-english-bibles.html
While not a question of whether it’s grammatical per se, I find the singular they to be awkward to use except when referring to hypothetical people which is sort of a pseudoplural.
Wouldn’t it be “they has their head in their ass” for singular?
That gets my vote.
My vote is to make “he” and/or “she” the non-gendered singular. They’re already widespread personal pronouns, so removing their gender connotation is a relatively subtle change. In particular, the need for gendered pronouns is derived from our society’s tendency to get hung up on gender. Reducing those hangups will reduce the need for gendered language, so the gender connotations falling away from “he” and “she” is likely to be a natural result.
When/if that happens, “he” and “she” will become redundant so one may fall out of use (such as when “thou” fell out of use after “you” took over for it). It’s also possible that both will stick around because having two identical pronouns makes it easier to refer to two people without mixing them up:
Person 1: “Fakeusername votes for it.”
Person 2: “Does he? What does Jake think?”
Person 1: “She disagrees with him.”
Person 3: “What’s his argument?” <– clearly refers to fakeusername since Jake is "she" in this exchange.
PZM: Perhaps you’re an old fogey, but you’re not *all* old fogies, so that doesn’t preclude hotspurphd from claiming to speak on behalf of some other subset of old fogies. Surely you recognize the difference between existential and universal claims?
It would be interesting to see an analysis of the acceptance or common use of singular “they” as related to age, education, geographic location, and other demographics.
Jake Harban:
Which makes you a prescriptivist who imagines they’re a descriptivist.
I don’t think I’d ever really be comfortable with he or she pronouns, having grown up and currently living in a world where they do carry gendered connotations.
Why don’t we just use a person’s preffered pronouns and deal with it? Most people seem to have no problem learning other’s peoples nyms and almost all of use rather casually use neologisms that are less than a decade old.
I’m sure you can figure out the singular they.
To echo PZ’s #26, I have been using they since at least starting school in 1955, having recently turned 64. Though I must admit I see less debate about the use of they on UK blogs than I do on US blogs. In fact, now that I think about it, I can’t personally remember ever seeing it brought up on a UK blog.
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/they
@taraskan
“We used to have two second person pronouns. “Thou/thee/thy” were singular, and “You/you/your” were plural.”
I thought “thou/thee/thy” were familiar, and “You/you/your” were formal.
Oh my god, apparently it was both! “Following the Norman invasion of 1066, thou was used to express intimacy, familiarity or even disrespect, while another pronoun, you, the oblique/objective form of ye, was used for formal circumstances”.
Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou
English: It’s WAY more complicated and way more changeable than you think.
Skipping past the fact that this alleged neologism is over five hundred years old, the so-called rules of grammar are there to make sure that there’s enough of a shared structure of language that one person may understand the meaning of another’s words. I don’t see how any word or combination of words can be considered an “affront to grammar,” provided that it conveys a clear and easily understood meaning. The “rules” should be descriptive, not prescriptive.
—————————————————
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) #16:
Regarding apostrophe misuse; when preparing to write this bit of vague musing, I tried copying large lumps of text and deleting all the apostrophes (both those indicating possessives and those indicating dropped letters) by find/replace, and reading them through. Turns out, for me at least, that the meaning of every s-ending was perfectly clear from context.
“they” should have gotten some company with the addition of a new gender neutral singular pronoun (perhaps “xe”); instead, “they” is now doing double duty – and poorly, at that. All this talk about context coming to the rescue ignores the reality that people tend to insert whatever context they like when reading a passage.
Here’s a 17 century rant against Singular “You”.
Chris Habecker #36:
Please provide examples of “poorly.” I’ve been using the singular they all my life, and I’ve never yet experienced this “poorly” you speak of. Sure, there can be ambiguity when two or more people or groups of people are being discussed; but that possibility of ambiguity exists with all pronouns.
Early Quaker rant on “singular you”
-Thomas Ellwood
https://scontent.fphl1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13508977_915155328593770_4741160992161936719_n.jpg?oh=8a6d6627082b8339888013deed9c0606&oe=5802FC37
Ruby beat me to it >.<
Ruby and Abe
Thank you both.
I now intend to return to singular “thou” and plural “you”.
They already think I’m a bit wacky, this could just fit.
I could care less about this story…
tacitus, I don’t not know what you imagine you are doing. ;)
(What you are actually doing is conflating lexicon with grammar)
chigau, intendest thou? Erstwhile wert thou thence?
John Morales
I was quite odd in junior high school.
I definitely tried something similar.
yclept chigau, :)
Tacitus, I think you may need to watch this:
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw[/embed]
Aaand the embed didn’t work.
Try this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw
taraskan.
Beautiful. Thank you.
I didn’t think the they usage came about to avoid sexist speech but I thought some here might object to not using it for that reason. I was recently asked to not say” x seems like a male to me because men are usually the most verbally aggressive”. I was asked ” not to do that” because it limits the choices to two. Thinking about that since I don’t see the objection most people are cisgendered. And I wouldn’t know how to talk about anyone but males and females in terms of what I would expect from one or the other. Are transsexual males similar to cis gendered. I have no idea. Does anyone? And how exactly does saying someone seems onemale offend? Again, what would one say the not offend here- he seems to be a cisgendered male ,
Or a trans…, or not a trans.. Someone else objected for an unstated reason. Still don’t know why.
@Chigau – Growing up, I encountered what the Quakers call “Plain Speech” on a fairly regular basis. My family and my meeting didn’t use it, but we were familiar with the writings of early Quakers, so I could speak like them pretty easily. It came in handy when I encountered Shakespeare.
There was also at least one Quaker joke I can recall poking fun at the way Quakers talked.
You were asked not to do it because it’s gross to hypothesize about someone’s gender from their actions. My objection that you stop using language that erases people like me was purely secondary.
Gross to do it through text, as a rhetorical jab, that is.
” ‘Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear the speech.”
Shakespeare used the singular they – your argument is invalid. Seriously, this has been in common usage for at least 500 years.
gondwanarama wrote:
Clearly he must’ve been a talentless hack if he didn’t realize that he must not ever do that. /s
Like split infinitives and participle stranding, people still want to fight battles lost centuries ago…
Oh, and to repost someone else’s tweet about grammar being what separates us from the animals:
These birds use a linguistic rule thought to be unique to humans
ck 54,
Often it seems like battles that never actually happened, but someone invented in order to look down on the speech of others. Singular they and split infinitives are good examples.
IMNSHO, Strunk and White were prescriptivist snobs who’ve got a lot to answer for. Language serves its user, not the reverse.
Chris @36: “They” isn’t oversubscribed. If you (thou) want to see oversubscribed, take a look at “Sie”. Sie means both (formal, singular or plural) you and they. And, if written “sie” (uncapitalized) it also means she. That’s an oversubscribed word. And don’t even ask what “werden” means. Words doing double duty is no big deal in language.
dianne @57, Chris @36,
also ihr, ihm, ihnen/Ihnen, ihre*, etwas….
German loves context.
My grandfather, born in Somerset around the end of the 19th century, used to use “thee” often as a pronoun. (“I gave it to thee”, “What’s up with thee?”)
And the non gendered singular they is used all the time in Australian English, in my experience.
“Someone rang for you.”
“What did they say?”
Ye dark gods, not this again…
The singular “they” has always been perfectly valid. There was a trend amongst prescriptivist grammarians during the Victorian era to discourage it in favour of the generic “he”, because being Victorians, they couldn’t help jamming their weird hang-ups about gender into absolutely everything. Opposition to the singular “they” is the new-fangled innovation, and it was introduced on more-or-less explicitly misogynistic grounds.
Is this really the hill anybody wants to die on?
Vivec 51 52.
I will repeat what I said I saw one the other thread. From experience I believe men far more often are verbally and physically abusive, women much less so. When someone behaves as abusively as the person who attacked me did, and who frequently does here, while others are calm and helpful, while he or she rants and raves and yells it seems, and jumps up and down screaming it seems, outside of a psychiatric ward (where I worked for many years) I have seen only men behave this way. I get a distinct feeling male from this persons writing. I don’t see this as offensive since I am a male for one thing. I’m I say men are imprisoned for more crimes, and are more violent than women do you object? If I say they account for nearly all the mass shootings ,is that ok since it is true? The only reason I suggested that Nerd is male is because his attacks have provoked such enmity in me, he has called me plenty of names like troll, paranoid , bullshitter, out the f my mind,what I’m saying is a pile of shit….over and over and on and on. It doesn’t seem such a bad thing to guess that is a male. It helps me visualize this person so I can direct my anger at a fantasy of a real person with a real(unattractive shape) who screams and jumps up and down. I was glad to see someone else who dislikes that persons behavior.
Vivec, are you serious that you have a problem with it limiting the choice to two. Should i have said cisgender straight male? Please! I don’t think I’m limiting anything. If I say I think someone is a male because few women are aggressive like that I’m not including any other categories because I don’t know anything about the behavior of people in those categories. And you wouldn’t have a need to stereotype “him” at all if I didn’t get angry at his attacks that I want to spray him with a fire hose, maybe I want to see him as male so I can dislike him more. Maybe I det feel right about attacking a woman. Anyway I should feel sorry for someone who, to hear Rob tell it, is often inappropriate ,calling everyone a troll. He perhaps attacks at what he think is the first hint of trollness( has a low bar for troll behavior) and goes on the attack self-righteously saving the blog from the enemy,frequenting saying “we” speaking for the wh.e group Rob says. I’ve noticed that with him. And I made me feel bad, that you all were talking about me and agreed was bad. It’s a rotten feeling. I read that many trolls are psychopaths. Psychopaths like to stir up trouble and their feelings don’t get hurt. They have no empathy and no conscience .they know how to expertly tone troll. We non psychopaths non-trolls are not tone trolling when we suggest more civility. In the past Nerd has been totally oblivious to any redeeming quality of this commenter. Thankfully n a recent thread Rob said I was a respected commenter and told both Raven and Nerd to shut the fuck up. I was very gladdened by this. It wasn’t just I who was attacked by these furious creatures. And others have responded to me kindly, helpfully, but when these two get going it stings me. If they do it again I don’t think it will hurt so much since I know they are not speaking for the group. And I know they have their own idiosyncratic axes to grind, I would speculate that each has a great need to attack people and hurt them. Maybe not. Maybe they really believe I’m a troll, it seems that way, but it seems so clear me ,and I think t other that I’m not. If I were they would talk to me so much. Please- look at the interchanges between Sastra and me in the “are we done yet” post. Judge for yourselves if I am a troll. Sastra doesn’t seem to think so.
Ok, good night.
PLEASE READ #61. Lots of typos.
Corrected version
hotspurphd
5 July 2016 at 4:46 am
Vivec 51 52.
I will repeat what I said I saw on the other thread. From experience I believe men far more often are verbally and physically abusive, women much less so. When someone behaves as abusively as the person who attacked me did, and who frequently does here, while others are calm and helpful, while he or she rants and raves and yells it seems, and jumps up and down screaming it seems, outside of a psychiatric ward (where I worked for many years) I have seen only men behave this way. I get a distinct feeling of maleness from this persons writing. I don’t see saying this as offensive since I am a male for one thing.male saying bad things about females is offensive. Is it if I say it about my own gender. If I say men are imprisoned for more crimes, and are more violent than women do you object? If I say they account for nearly all the mass shootings ,is that ok since it is true? The only reason I suggested that Nerd is male is because his attacks have provoked such enmity in me, he has called me plenty of names like troll, paranoid , bullshitter, out the f my mind,what I’m saying is a pile of shit….over and over and on and on. It doesn’t seem such a bad thing to guess that he is a male. That’s what we males do a lot and It helps me visualize this person so I can direct my anger at a fantasy of a real person with a real(unattractive shape) who screams and jumps up and down. I was glad to see someone else who dislikes that persons behavior.
Vivec, are you serious that you have a problem with it limiting the choice to two. Should i have said cisgender straight male? Really? I don’t think I’m limiting anything. Should I trot out several other categories and say this person doesn’t seems to fit them? I don’t get it. If I say I think someone is a male because few women are aggressive like that I’m not including any other categories because I don’t know anything about the behavior of people in those categories. And i wouldn’t have a need to stereotype “him” at all if I didn’t get so angry at his attacks that I want to spray him with a fire hose, maybe I want to see him as male so I can dislike him more. Maybe I don’t feel right about attacking a woman. Anyway I should feel sorry for someone who, to hear Rob tell it, is often inappropriate ,calling everyone a troll. He perhaps attacks at what he think is the first hint of trollness( has a low bar for troll behavior) and goes on the attack self-righteously saving the blog from the enemy,frequenting saying “we” speaking for the whole group Rob says. I’ve noticed that with him. And It made me feel bad, that you all were talking about me and agreed was I bad. It’s a rotten feeling. I read that many trolls are psychopaths. Psychopaths like to stir up trouble and their feelings don’t get hurt. They have no empathy and no conscience .they know how to expertly tone troll. We non psychopaths non-trolls are not tone trolling when we suggest more civility. I find it to be true that calm and reason are help in learning from you-far more insults and attacks. In the past Nerd has been totally oblivious to any redeeming quality of this commenter. Thankfully in a recent thread Rob said I was a respected commenter and told both Raven and Nerd to shut the fuck up. I was very gladdened by this. It wasn’t just I who had been attacked by these furious creatures. And others have responded to me kindly, helpfully, but when these two get going it stings me. If they do it again I don’t think it will hurt so much since I know they are not speaking for the group. And I know they have their own idiosyncratic axes to grind, I would speculate that each has a great need to attack people and hurt them. Maybe not. Maybe they really believe I’m a troll, it seems that way, but it seems so clear me ,and I think to others that I’m not. If I were they wouldn’t talk to me so much. Please- look at the interchanges between Sastra and me in the “Our job is done, atheists” post. Judge for yourselves if I am a troll. Sastra doesn’t seem to think so.
Ok, good night.
People suggesting that we use “it”, are you aware that “it” is commonly used to dehumanise trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people? That seems to me to be a far bigger problem than some occasional ambiguity.
dunc @60: Wait, so you’re saying that actually the lack of singular they is a bit of new fangled nonsense added but 150 or so years ago, suppressing the natural grammar that people have used in English since…since there was such a thing as English? That’s an affront to grammar!
Indeed. “It” is explicitly dehumanising in English, to the extent that people frequently won’t even use it for inanimate objects that they feel some emotional connection to.
Reading this blog (and others in the network) for several years, I never noticed a singular they, nor knew there was such a thing. I probably simply misunderstood it as a plural. Can anyone help with a few example sentences where it sounds relatively normal? English is not my first (or second) language, so I’d really like to understand how using a word that instinctively means something else is used. The example of Shakespeare doesn’t help, as “…since nature makes them partial…” is not singular, the Phone call sounds completely wrong, too; “He called – What did they say?`” and examples of confusing sentences like “Alex drove Kelly home, then they went to the store” are a reason not to use it, I mean if this is correct grammar, we’re doing something wrong. Do I simply substitute him and her with they? Isn’t that very confusing and the reason we don’t use it anymore? Am I correct to assume this is not the same situation as with “literally” where we simply surrendered to the misinterpretation? And why not stay with “thee” or “thou” if there’s a need for ungendered pronouns?
@ 66 fffabio
I’m not sure I understand your problem, but I’ll give it a shot.
When a customer comes into your store you should greet them and ask if they need assistance.
Alternatives are:
When a customer comes into your store you should greet him or her and ask if he or she needs assistance.
(Sounds very awkward.)
When a customer comes into your store you should greet the customer and ask if the customer needs assistance.
(Better, but still, I think, more awkward than the original.)
No, it makes me a descriptivist who speculates how language might change in response to social changes.
Incidentally, I mentioned two speculations for what might happen if “he” and “she” lose gender connotations but you quotemined that to make it look like I was insisting on the use of one.
Ironically, insisting that the singular they be brought back because it was used centuries ago before prescriptivists convinced everyone to change it makes you a prescriptivist yourself.
Except that “they” is a pseudoplural; it refers to one arbitrary member of the group “customers,” and the sentence describes in action to be taken with multiple customers. It’s much closer to “when customers come into your store” than “when Jake comes into your store.”
@fffabio, 66
It’s not all that difficult. Use it where gender is ambiguous or you don’t want to make assumptions (“I saw someone out by the lake. They were wearing dark glasses and a hat, so I couldn’t see their face.” “I met Jordan at a party, but I didn’t really get a chance to really talk to them.”) or when it is a person’s preferred term of address (“My friend Resa has been going to school for a long time now, they’re really working hard for their degree.”). It fits essentially anywhere where you would use a third person personal pronoun, the only part that I suspect may be confusing are the conjugation issues. With he or she you use “was,” whereas with they you use “were.”
The thing is, they tried to convince everyone, but weren’t successful. The use of the singular “they” never actually went away. People use it all the time without even noticing, particularly when paired with a generic antecedent. Although it is apparently less preferred (or more strongly resisted, if you like) in American English than British English, and also less preferred in writing than in speech.
Obviously. tongue. in. cheek. No. language. purist. would. use. excessive. punctuation.
Oh, and as for this:
English grammar contains no concept of a “pseudoplural”. “Customer” is a singular generic antecedent. If you’re reduced to inventing entirely imaginary grammatical concepts in order to argue that “a customer” is really plural so that you can defend your opposition to the singular “they”, then I’d say you’ve lost the battle.
@68
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with saying “When Jake comes into your store you should greet them,” unless the speaker knows you prefer “him.”
Singular “they” is correct in person (third) and grammatical gender (common), so it’s only wrong in number. And I for one would rather be miscounted than misgendered. English has already lost the distinction between singular and plural in the second person, so why not in the third?
I’ve always wondered what separates us from animals. Now I know. Thanks, Andy!
P.S. Don’t language rules say that a period should end a full sentence?
#75 / Rietje: I always thought it was wearing trousers.
FWIW, graduating from public schools in Maryland in ’86 I was taught that ‘he’ was the proper pronoun to use if the gender was unknown. By the early nineties, I would just arbitrarily use ‘he’ or ‘she’ in my writing (mostly stuff like application design documents: one use case, I’d use ‘the user’/’he’, the next one ‘the user’/’she’). I did that because ‘they’ still just sounded weird and clunky to me. In the past few years, I’ve switched to they when the gender’s unknown.
And generally I use ‘folks’ or ‘yall’ when referring to a group of people, although I still sometimes slip and use ‘you guys.’
Arguing for consistency or logic in English grammar is tilting at windmills, given that it’s a prescriptive and not descriptive grammar, and given that it’s a weird language that’s been hybridized with so many other languages.
I vote we all just switch to Marain instead.
Anthropomorphizing Grammar is offensive. The original tweet should have referred to grammarians and then would have been more obviously ridiculous, as demonstrated over the course of this thread.
I would only suggest that people like myself have for most of our lives (I’m north of 50), from school on forward, been taught that “they” is plural. While I don’t care about it being used in the singular, there’s that part in the brain sounding alarms because it goes against a lifetime of teaching and usage.
However people getting pissy this really need to find something more worthwhile to get pissed about.
Also creating new pronouns will be met with resistance simply because when you try to use them with people that never heard of them their first thought will be “That’s not even a word” which will immediately set them mentally on the defensive.
Ugh, things like,
… almost seem contrived to make a problem where there is one. I don’t know how it’s possible to think this would be the natural or instinctive way to concoct this string of actions if you are trying to say that one or the other, and not both, went to the store.
If Alex went to the store, why the hell wouldn’t you write, “Alex drove Kelly home, then went to the store”?
If Kelly went to the store, why wouldn’t you write, “Alex drove Kelly home, then Kelly went to the store”?
How it is written in the example clearly implies both of them went to the store in context – because otherwise someone would have written something similar to one of the two sentences above.
This is so simple it seems intentionally obtuse to use the quoted as an example of a “confusing” instance.
… “problem where there isn’t one”.
Speaking of grammar and language issues, it truly seems like I can’t write a single comment without making at minimum one mistake.
Some of us like having the gendered assumptions attache to the pronoun. But yes the usage of they/their/them as a singular is cool. If it was good enough for Shakespeare was good enough for me.
Also note:
Jeff drove Mike home. Then he went to the store.
:P
Jeff drove Mike home and then went to the store.
No pronouns needed.
“I’m 59. What am I?”
It makes you just a kid from my perspective at 72.
Next they’ll be laying to old “infinitives must not be split” nonsense at us and they will want to rewrite Shakespeare as “To be, or to not be”.
For everyone struggling with this simple concept, I present the text from this image:
Is that like the opposition against uae of plural ‘you’ instead of thou?
^use
Foreigner here living in USA for many years now . Haven’t noticed the singular ‘they’ yet. Anyone has a real life example handy?
Because English became so terribly, terribly confusing once we lost the distinction between singular and plural second person pronouns.
yubal #90:
Well, here’s a whole bunch from Jane Austen. We’ve had a Shakespeare quote in the thread already. There’s a nice little self-referential pun using the possessive form here; Everybody Has Their Own Opinion About the Singular They [pdf]. Another possessive: “If ye from your hearts forgive not every one their trespasses” (King James Bible—1611).
Contrary to popular (in some places) mythology, the singular usage is not new and nor is it a historical relic which some people want to revive for “PC” reasons. As I mentioned up-thread, I’ve been using it as a normal, unconscious part of speech for all of my life, as have all speakers of English as a first language—probably without even noticing they were doing it:
Gregory, English was always confusing for the lack of following up with grammar rules and thus the infinite space of exceptions.
Das,
Thanks for replying. I’ll look into it.
For the two examples you used, they both have some plural character although singular (everyone)
Cheers
Y
yubal #94:
In which case it would not be possible to replace each with a singular pronoun. Yet both “Everybody Has His Own Opinion” and “forgive not every one her trespasses,” make perfect sense (provided we ignore the implied gendering, of course). Fact is, English treats both “everyone” and “everybody” as singular. We never say “Everyone are” or “Everybody are.”
Late to the party, but…
Some of us had Jr High English teachers who lowered the essay one letter grade for each subject/verb disagreement (fail with an “A” essay that used “they” as a singular pronoun 4 times).
And then we spent a few decades trying to clean up policy documents that in order to be inclusive had been written with the awful “he/she” construction instead of a plural subject (it’s almost always possible).
Plus it’s fun to argue it because it is completely unimportant (beyond conforming your writing to the house style when preparing documents for publication).
I will, however, cut you if you try to take my Oxford comma away from me.
Also, regarding second-person plural and singular. You might want to hold back on singling English out for its confusing usage. A French person addressing their boss using the singular “tu” could probably serve as a warning that others can be as illogical as we.
No, it’s not, because some people prefer to be referred to as “they”, and shitbags use the excuse of “proper grammar” to misgender them.
I think it’s time to bring back a singular, informal “you”. There are already several informal plural forms of “you” (y’all, youse, etc) so not having a singular informal is just weird.
The problem is that at this point most English speakers believe that “thou” is actually a formal term, probably because they associated archaic with formal. Any suggestions?
I love archaic! Bring it on: thee, thou and thy!
@100: Thou hast a point.
why does that sound like one of those “red black and blue all over… what am I?” jokes…
A few points:
The metaphor of linguistic “rules” should be bashed over the head with an old-fashioned dial telephone and buried in a deep, unmarked grave somewhere in the forests of northern Alaska. I realize that we linguists have perpetuated that metaphor, but really what we’re talking about are habits and constructions which receive more or less widespread agreement among a group of speakers, not rules that are imposed from on high. (I could go on more of a rant, but I’m already straying off topic.)
There are actually a few related uses of what’s loosely being referred to as “singular they”. One use is, as yubal noted, when the antecedent is singular in form but plural in semantics–“everyone gets what they deserve”. Anyone who complains about that usage should pull their quill pens out of their asses.
Another common use (at least in US English) is when the antecedent is singular in form and semantics, but the gender is unknown–“someone broke into the house and they ate all the porridge!” That’s essentially the same construction that we use when we refer to posters whose preferred pronouns we don’t know as “they” (“yubal made a good point in their post”.
Most speakers of US English have no problems with either of those uses, even if they send outraged letters to the editor about how the language is being degraded but such “barbarities”. (I won’t vouch for other Englishes.)
There’s a third use that’s an extension of the second use, but that’s fairly new and is probably what causes confusion in some of us fogies and “anti-PC” outrage among others. That’s the use of “they” usually (always? I don’t want to overgeneralize) for people who don’t fit into the binary gender system that English grammar tries to impose on humanity (and of course English isn’t alone in this–most Indo-European and Semitic languages do the same; Farsi is the only exception I know of). The thing about grammatical distinctions is that the force speakers to attend to certain aspects of the linguistically relevant environment. (One example of this is the use of cardinal directions in Guugu Yimithirr–in that language, you don’t say “Amy’s sitting on Jon’s right” but rather something like “Amy’s sitting to the west of Jon”. Native speakers of the language have an amazing awareness of the cardinal directions, even if they’re plopped down in an unfamiliar setting with no obvious clues. (I don’t have a scholarly reference handy, but here’s a link.))
So anyway, this newish use of singular they can cause some confusion for some of us, especially if it’s used to refer to an already named person (and more especially if that person’s name is stereotypically gendered). I’ve had that happen a few times myself, once on this site and once when reading about a non-binary singer).
To be clear, I’m not complaining about this use of singular “they”–on the contrary, as a linguist and a native speaker of US English, I welcome it; my own occasional confusion is irrelevant when compared to respecting the full humanity of all. But I do think it’s helpful to recognize that we’re dealing with a relatively new use of singular “they”, and that it will probably take some time to catch on.