Endnotes or Footnotes? Some Considerations →

Dogma vs. Evidence: Singular They

January 5, 2012, 12:01 am

I promised I would return to the vexed topic of using they or them or their with singular antecedents. Your holiday homework was to re-read the first act of The Importance of Being Earnest and comment. Richard Grayson (see the comments) saw the point immediately: Lady Bracknell remarks that at her last reception she wants music “that will encourage conversation, particularly at the end of the season when everyone has practically said whatever they had to say, which, in most cases, was probably not much” (underlining is mine). Everyone is the subject; the verb form has shows singular agreement; yet the pronoun she chooses is they.

The conclusion I draw is that singular they is fully grammatical, at least with quantifier-like antecedents such as everyone, nobody, etc. If Lady Bracknell is not the most intimidatingly formal speaker of Standard English in all of literature, I don’t know who is. We can’t dismiss her for lack of breeding. If Lady Bracknell uses a construction, I say it’s grammatical. (Or do you want to dismiss Oscar Wilde as unable to write grammatical lines for her to utter?)

One could say something similar about the real-life Lord Byron, who wrote contemptuously of Cambridge University: “Nobody here seems to look into an Author, ancient or modern, if they can avoid it.” The -s on seems shows singular agreement with nobody, which is the antecedent of they. Do the pedants really want to say that Lord Byron couldn’t make his pronouns agree?

One could go on. Shakespeare? Yes, he used singular they. Jane Austen? Large numbers of examples throughout her books. Who else? Perhaps the most telling example is that although Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style preaches against singular they, when E. B. White got back to his own excellent writing he wrote lines like “But somebody taught you, didn’t they?” (that’s from Charlotte’s Web).

What baffles me is how reluctant educated people are to take such facts as evidence. This is what I meant about Mary’s reaction to my usage. I’m not arrogantly assuming personal authority (though the commenter who uses the name “clarity_please” thinks I am, and others agree). Remember, I’m the one who pays attention to evidence from Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron and Jane Austen and E. B. White and huge numbers of other fine writers, not the one who pig-headedly insists on unquestioned dogma.

I’m not bossing Mary around concerning how to use her native language (that really would be arrogant); she doesn’t have to use they anywhere she doesn’t choose to. I’m just commenting on her amazing unwillingness to take anybody’s writing as evidence about what is grammatical, rather than as grounds for (however implausibly) calling the writer ignorant or careless. She clings to a sort of faith-based grammar: She thinks there are rules that we should follow even if native-speaking grammarians and fine playwrights and novelists disregard them—even if nobody in the world follows them (recall her remark: “No way shall I ever be convinced to change this in my writing or listening”). Why such a resolutely and hermetically theological view?

Some people clearly have an oversimplified misconception of the rule: “They must always refer to a group of entities” or something of the sort (“clarity_please” seems to have such a view). They write trying to explain to me, as if I were in elementary school, that “simple arithmetic” should tell me I am wrong. They seem not to realize that trying to suck grammatical truths out of naive conceptions of meaning is like trying to get blood out of a turnip. But they just stick with their misconceptions against all evidence, Wilde and Byron and Austen and White and Pullum be damned.

Some people may think I am pushing some kind of modern political correctness to avoid the apparent sexism of “Everyone should bring his own lunch,” but they are simply uninformed: singular they antedates modern feminism by hundreds of years. What I’m saying here has nothing to do with expungement of the apparent sexism of putatively sex-neutral he. It’s simply that I never cease to be amazed at such determined refusal to look at the evidence for English sentence structure the way we typically look at the evidence for, say, anatomical structure.

Normal people don’t say “No way will I ever accept the existence of a furry creature with a beak”: The discovery of the duck-billed platypus settles it against that opinion. When the topic is grammar, it seems that for some people nothing can ever settle anything.

[A brief update: For the people who have asked me why they takes plural agreement: "singular they" is an abbreviatory name, and it does not imply anything about agreement. They always takes the plural agreement form, regardless of its meaning; and everybody always takes the singular agreement form. That does not mean it's a contradiction for they to have everybody as its antecedent. Consider Everybody hopes that they are going to be the lucky one. The main clause subject everybody requires the singular form hopes; the subordinate clause subect they requires the plural form are; semantically, they expresses a bound variable; everything is as it should be. The sentence is fully grammatical.]

This entry was posted in Grammar, Mistakes, Style, Writing. Bookmark the permalink.

E-mail

mbelvadi

I fully agree with your main point, but would argue that the best evidence for the acceptability of a “rule” (that it’s ok to use “they” with words like “everybody”) comes not from a handful of elite writers who are obviously very self-conscious in their use, but rather from the usage of millions of native speakers just saying/writing what comes “naturally” – we are after all talking about a “natural language”. In the past, there was really no way to measure the millions, so we relied on the elite, but with the Internet, we now have available the ability to quantify the usage of the masses. In this case, I think the evidence is that the masses and the elite agree – Mary and her ilk are the outliers.
breader

The problem isn’t the occasional use of “they” as a singular pronoun. The problem is the breakdown of logic that comes with persistent, often unnecessary, conflation of singular and plural forms in a language that depends heavily on pronouns. The lax logic is counterintuitive to professional writing, particularly in the non-fiction writing common in journalism, education, public service, and research. It is lazy, unprofessional, and (worst of all) inaccurate.

A simple example: “When a student finishes their test, they should read it over before handing it to the teacher.” Such contortion of number is unnecessary unless there is only one student in the class. The sentence just as easily could be written in all plurals, which would retain the “they/their” but also have the benefit of being, you know, accurate: “When students finish their tests, they should read them over before handing them to the teacher.”

“They”/”their” are fine — the problem is with the antecedents and objects. There are many students; each has one test, so there also are many tests. The “many” is important information.

I cringe when my university’s PeopleSoft system tells me “This student has a hold on their enrollment” (rather than “There is a hold on this student’s enrollment”), and when social-media systems notify us that “This person has updated their profile” (rather than “This person’s profile has been updated”). I cringe not because of the sloppy grammar. I cringe because of the lazy writing.

There likely are situations when a “they” or a “their” is the best choice for a singular pronoun, particularly in the construction of dialogue or in colloquial/informal speaking. A writer being too lazy to even think or care about pronoun agreement is not such a situation.

– Bill Reader, associate professor of journalism, Ohio University

jffoster

The things you identify as “problems” don’t seem so to most of us. Do you find double negatives (as in non standard English ”She don’t know nothing., or in standard literary Russian Ona ne znajet nichevo’.) to be a “logical” problem because in algebra two negatives multiplied yield a positive product?

breader

There is no “problem” with “She don’t know nothing” if the goal is to communicate colloquial speech. It is a serious problem if the goal is to communicate that “she” is misinformed about something — in which case, “She is misinformed” is better (I refuse to acknowledge that a conscious person “doesn’t know anything”).

An example I use in class is from a press release issued several years ago promoting a Halloween party: “Concert patrons are encouraged to wear a costume and join the fun!” Many patrons, one costume — perhaps a Trojan Horse?

There is simply no good reason not to change “a costume” to “costumes” — other than laziness. Contextually, the concert in question would seem more appealing if many patrons were wearing many different costumes; the plural “costumes” does more than simply fulfill grammatical dictates — it paints a picture of multiple costumes.

I use words for a living; they are my tools. I also use grammar for a living; it is my technique. I choose to take care of my tools and to refine my technique.

Misusing words or breaking the conventions of grammar often can be done to great effect, both in speech and in writing. And because writing is more art than science, it is rarely, if ever, perfect. Imperfect is not the same as careless.

I choose not to be careless.You may choose to be careless in your professional writing, of course (including claiming to speak on behalf of “most of us,” or suggesting that English grammar be conflated with the grammar of Russian or with the functions of algebra, for example). Let’s compare apples with apples — and not “an apple with oranges.”

dank48

How about “Concert patrons are encouraged to wear a costume and have a blast”? I’m lazy if I don’t change it to “. . . wear costumes and have blasts”? Right.

Using the objective form of the second-person plural pronoun for the subjective second-person singular or plural is universally acceptable simply because we’re used to it. “Thou” and the other singular forms have long been relegated to prayer, if that, and the Grundys didn’t get excited when subjective “ye” got replaced by objective “you,” for whatever reason. But if thou insistest on ignoring the real history of the language, thou canst and mayest cling to whatever dogma pleaseth thee.

William Safire was right: “The interesting thing about language is that, when enough of us are wrong, we’re right.”
breader

“Concert patrons are encouraged … to have a blast” is grammatically correct, dank48. But that level of nitpicking is both beside the point and not productive.

You make a good point about the evolution of language, but I worry that the growing disregard (disdain, even) for certain conventions of grammar is more like grotesque mutation than beneficial advancement. Changing, even breaking, conventions ain’t the problem — a fundamental disregard for conventions is. It’s as if the unnecessary misuse of “they” and “their” is just another way to say “i doesn’t need no education. Teacher’s is paid to dam much anwyay … .”

I like Coltrane. He knew the rules of music so well that he broke those rules with frequent and regular brilliance.

Likewise, your obvious mastery of the language is enhanced by your selective and intentional deviations from the formal conventions. If you choose to ignore/reject those conventions, so be it, but it seems to me that you respect them a great deal more than acolytes of Conan the Grammarian.
peter_howard

I agree that:
”Concert patrons are encouraged to wear a costume and join the fun!”
is technically ambiguous, but so is:
”Concert patrons are encouraged to wear costumes and join the fun!”
as this could mean that each patron is encouraged to wear a plurality of costumes. Neither version is likely to cause much confusion, so I don’t see the reason for preferring one over the other. And I don’t see why using the former implies laziness – it takes one more keystroke to type, so surely the lazy person would choose the latter.
http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

I also earn my living by writing, and I agree that carelessness and laziness are things we want to avoid. However, to whom and to what end is our care directed? To the readers, surely, and to their understanding of what is written.

Since I work on widely differing genres of text, from everyday correspondence to advertising, I am aware that the amount of effort one puts into honing a text is very elastic. A day may be spent working on a sentence or two, or in writing thousands of words, without wasting any time in the one case or being unduly slapdash in the other. Also, the opportunities for misunderstandings, garden path processing effects in sentences and reduction of words without sacrificing sense are legion; we are never finished with them. Therefore it is essential to spend our time on things which are actually significant for the readers’ understanding of the text. Time spent paying homage to one’s own personal grammatical desiderata is just vanity if these issues are of no importance to the readers of the text in hand (and in the case of freelancers like me, it’s time that nobody is paying for).

I don’t believe for a moment that the kind of “they” sentences discussed here by Prof. Pullum, or sentences like “patrons should wear a costume” (how does that continue: patrons should wear costumes and have blasts?”) cause any problem of that kind at all. If you want to insist on their undesirability, the onus is on you to show what problem they cause to readers, and I don’t think you have shown that yet.

These Strunkoclast hobbyhorses of Pullum & Co. are not even the main issue, but because several revered older style guides make a big deal of them, it’s necessary to have them cleared out of the way. They are not the key to good writing.

There are a great deal of other things to say about what makes a clear, understandable, coherent text – a lot to say about how to be clear, and which words are needful, etc.: enough to fill decent-sized books with concise practical advice about the nuts and bolts of different sentence structures, and so on.

(A great deal of criticism of contemporary journalism is possible (and needful) which would also have nothing at all to do with these things but alas, most journalists who write about writing scarcely get beyond them.)

A book I’m reading just now is a pretty comprehensive survey of the tools of a writer’s trade in English. It’s called Writing in English: A Guide for Advanced Learners by Siepmann, Gallagher, Hannay and Mackenzie. It’s aimed at German speakers, and published in Germany. What I am astonished by, reading it, is that the canon of major books on writing for native-speaker professional writers apparently does not include any book of this kind of scope.
http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

I suspect the “a” in the example is there partly as a phonetic bridge. “Wear costume” would be as “logical” as “wear costumes”. But there’s an awkward gap betwen the two words. Not everything is grammar.

3rdtyrant

I couldn’t agree more. This is larger than a descriptivist penchant for what is, I fear, an abandonment of thinking communication for easy communication. The logic in adopting things because everyone does it is a little scary. I understand that everyone does it and it works, but lots of things that are reprehensible work. Cannibalism works, but I doubt that, because it’s easy to eat the neighboring tribe and everyone is doing it, we all ought to jump in. Grammatical correctness, even in the face of descriptivist path-of-least-resistance and utilitarian arguments (the latter of which is a chimera, I think you would agree), promotes logical and accurate thinking, which pays great dividends in the long run. We govern language; language does not govern us, though it tries to. Some forces of language change deserve to be resisted, and agreement problems are one of them

And to those who want to bring language comparisons in from distant branches of the language tree, please recognize how unfair those comparisons are. The development of the emphatic double negative is such a different construct from the illogical double negative that to try to justify willingly illogical grammar based on that comparison is, itself, a logical incongruence.

jffoster

It was Breader who introduced the topic of “breakdown” in logic, apparently on the assumption that some general universal logic has something to do with what is grammatical in particular languages. So it is perfectly legitimate to wonder just how far he would follow such a road. The English double negative, as in They didn’t catch no fish is not an “emphatic” but is an ordinary English declarative sentence in many dialects and has been with English for a long time. It has been very common for Mrs. Schluckheimer to warn children against it on the assertion that two negatives make a positive. If one is going to use a general “logic” in these kinds of arguments, one must therefore claim that literary Russian is illogical and unmathematical because it routinely uses double negatives, or, as it’s called in Linguistics, negative reduplication.

I notice that neither Breader, nor you, nor anyone else has responded to Dank48′s observation about you with a singular referent but taking are, a generally plural verb. Apparently that “breakdown in logic” is all right. Why?

airolg

I think nobody but you commented on Dank48′s observation about ”you … are” because nobody but you understood it. (At least I didn’t and of course that’s what counts.)
jffoster

to airlog,
     First, it is commendable that you have the intelligence to realize it that you don’t understand the example, and the honesty and courage to say so. A number of people who comment on posts on this blog and even a couple who write originals don’t understand much about language and lack one or both of these traits you have exhibited.

Maybe this’ll help:

S 1. I was never a prescriptivist.
P 1. We were never presecriptivists.

S 3. He, she, it was never a prescriptivist.
P 3. They  were never  prescriptivists.

Now, that takes care of the 1st and third persons singular and plural subjects.   The form was is clearly for use with singular subjects and the verb form were for use with plural subjects.    So we would expect, given that number agreement consistency seems sooooooo important to the people attacking singular they with its plural verb that we would find in all standard and most nonstandard English dialects

S 2. * You was never a prescriptivist.

where the speaker is addressing one person but

P 2. You (Yall) were never prescriptivists

when the subject is plural, addressing two or more persons.

But it ain’t.   Sentence S2 is “starred” which is used in Linguistics as an indication that a form is ungrammatical. S2 is found in no standard English dialect and only a few nonstandard ones. It has instead to be,

S 2 You were never a prescriptivist.

and the only formal indication that S2′s subject is singular is the presence of the indefinite article on ‘prescriptivist’.

So you whether with singular or plural reference always takes a plural verb.  But Breader and the other “they can’t be indefinite gender singular” prescriptivist crowd on here don’t seem to be bothered about using you were to address a single individual.

rrhersh

“This is larger than a descriptivist penchant for what is, I fear, an
abandonment of thinking communication for easy communication.”

Am I the only one who suspects this is a parody in the spirit of Stephen Colbert?

peter_howard

Rewriting:[1] “When a student finishes their test, they should read it over before handing it to the teacher.”
as:
[2] “When students finish their tests, they should read them over before handing them to the teacher.”
introduces an ambiguity. In [1] it’s clear that each student has one test to finish, read over, and then hand in. In [2] it might mean that each student has multiple tests to complete. There’s another ambiguity – maybe all the students have to finish before they collectively start to read their tests over, though this is less likely to cause confusion. (But things would be different in the case of ”When students finish their tests, they should hold a party.”) So, I’d maintain that [1] is preferable to [2] on the grounds of clarity.
theart

‘…when social-media systems notify us that “This person has updated their
profile” (rather than “This person’s profile has been updated”). I
cringe not because of the sloppy grammar. I cringe because of the lazy
writing.’

The lengths to which some will go to avoid using the passive voice…

dank48

“Faith-based grammar” is delicious. I wish I’d thought of it.

I still don’t see how people who care enough about grammar to study it can overlook the fact that they use the second-person plural for the singular all the time, just as everybody else does, unless there’s some enclave keeping “thou,” “thee,” “thy,” “thine” alive. We never hear the historically “correct” singular except in prayer, and nowadays not often then.

BReader’s thoughtful but imo off-the-mark comments certainly show that reasonable people can disagree, and I think we should all be grateful for that. But the bottom line is that the rules describe how people play the game, and when enough people want to change how they play the game, the rules change . . . for those players at least. If some people want to avoid splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, and using singular “they” in their own writing and speech, then that’s their business. But explaining disagreement with their preferences as laziness strikes me as, well, lazy, not to mention ahistorical.

I try not to criticize others’ religious beliefs, since each of us is in the minority, regardless of what we believe, but when someone gets so wrapped up in their faith that they regard anyone who thinks differently as an infidel, they’ve got a bigger problem than erroneous belief: intolerance.

And just as there’s a time and an occasion for “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Ain’t Necessarily So,” there are times when the number of negatives fails to abide by algebraic rules:

“We know what you’re thinking,” said Tweedledee, “and it’s not so, nohow.”
“Contrariwise,” said Tweedledum, “if it was so, then it might be, and if it were so, then it would be, but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

Logic is good, but expecting the history of a language to display logical progression toward a logical perfection is illogical.

breader

dank48: My concern is not with “rules.” It’s with intent.

If the intent is to evoke a certain emotion or aesthetic, then certainly “Git ‘r done” ‘n’ whawtnawt.

If the intent is to provide accurate procedural instructions, then “accuracy” should matter.

One of my neighbors has a fence around his property, and on the fence hang several signs that read “SMILE. Your on camera!” (“SMILE” also is italicized). The signs clearly signal “Stay out!,” but with about as much authority as a toothless Dobermann. The pronoun error suggests a degree of carelessness on the part of somebody involved in the alleged security system. Because such signs are not rare around these-here parts, and many of us locals know that the typo-bearing signs were sold by a local junk dealer at discount prices (without security cameras, by the way), the true meaning of the signs is “There is no camera, just these ignorant signs.”

The gas station where I typically fill up has custom-printed signs on the gas pumps, all reading “No checks excepted.”

And one of my guilty pleasures is the Adult Swim cartoon “Squidbillies,” which features some truly ingenious wordplay, such as this exchange between the lead character, Early Cuyler, and his son, Rusty:

Early: “What did I tell you about drinking underneath the age, huh?” Rusty: “You said if I could afford to bring back enough for you then you don’t care what I do. And it’s my body and I can kill it however I want to. And America’s about freedom.”

I think “SMILE. You’re on camera!” would be a more effective deterrent. I think the gas station will have some problems if a litigious patron decides to try paying with a check, lawyer in tow. I think both exemplify unnecessary (and self-defeating) carelessness

But Squidbillies? It’s perfect, just as it is.

dank48

“Your on camera” and “No checks excepted” result from ignorance, not laziness. Ignoring the signs would be ill-advised in either case.

One of the most eloquent remarks I ever heard was unsullied by correctness. Forty years ago, as we were driving home from a surveying job, we passed a gas station advertising a stack of retread tires for ten dollars apiece. The driver murmured, “Bet them’s dandies.”

Like other behavior, usage varies with context. The notion that there are universal laws of nature governing how people talk and write seems to me erroneous. Ethics or grammar, you can’t get from “is” to “should” without a leap of faith, great or small.

http://twitter.com/ru3 R U there

I was thoroughly enjoying this article and in strong agreement until you used “beak” instead of “bill.” Yes, I’m making a joke about nitpicking and semantic accuracy…but seriously, it’s not a beak.
http://twitter.com/LaraKennelly Laura Kennelly

“Everyone should bring his own lunch” turns gender-neutral plural with the charming (and funny to my ear)
“Everyone should bring they own lunch.” I like it; I really do. It’s already in some dialects. I agree, if Wilde, Bryon, Austen did it, let’s do it too. They might have also used the universal “he” as well. I get the idea that some people feel excluded by “he,” but I always took it as meaning me as well. Don’t think it made me less empowered–.

dank48

“Everyone should bring their own lunch” uses an indefinite third-person singular possessive adjective, not a pronoun.

http://twitter.com/LaraKennelly Laura Kennelly

Yes, but we were writing about “they” and so I substituted “they” for the “his” in the sentence the author offered.
nordicexpat

It’s a pronoun, not an adjective. “possessive adjective” is a term from school grammar, but I don’t know any scholarly grammar from the last 50 years that refers to “his,” “her,”their,” etc. as adjectives. I never understood how that classification as an adjective came about. Adjectives can’t appear in that position (*everybody brought big lunch is ungrammatical, but I brought my lunch is fine), and in other contexts, pronouns appear where a genitive form of the noun appears (I stole Mary’s lunch, I stole her lunch).

jffoster

Agree with you I do, but as you probaboly know, in the Romance and some Germanic languages, these things like my, your, his, her, our, their, … are like attributive adjectives and demonstratives in that they take agreement morphemes with their heads, i.e. the nouns they modify. So sein Buch in German ‘his/its book’ but seine Tochter ‘his daughter. So that may be the origin of the nonion ‘possessive adjective, in addition to the English distinction betweem forms like my ~ mine,, generalized in some nonstandard dialects to his ~ hisn, her ~ hern, our ~ ourn, your ~ yourn, their ~ theirn .
http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

If someone came up with a terminology for these things that followed a reasonably consistent pattern whether one were talking about English or German in English or German, it would ease my brain considerably.
http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

If someone came up with a terminology for these things that followed a reasonably consistent pattern whether one were talking about English or German in English or German, it would ease my brain considerably.

wordsmith818

Fabulous. I’m starting to wonder if the argument against singular usage of *they* hasn’t dug in expressly because of the feminist objection to the “putatively sex-neutral *he.*” Few things resist evidence more than fear of a raised consciousness.
mededitor

Of course, not all instances of “singular they” are created equal. Antecedents like “anyone,” “everyone,” “nobody,” etc., seem to function somewhat like collective nouns, such as “staff” or “team,” that can happily take plural or singular form depending on the intent of the speaker.

Depending on the subject of the sentence and its distance from the verb, we can construct a range of sentences that run the gamut from happy to unhappy with regard to “they.” For example:

1. The butcher took their knife. (unhappy)
2. Every cook will be happy when they find this book under the Christmas tree (happier)

This seems to be one reason why some people are particularly upset with “singular they”: They may be envisioning deeply unhappy usage, whereas the proponents largely champion happier instances.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1543793254 Diane Alexander

As a freelance editor, I agree with your remarks. “Chicago” is great for some things but the written word needs to be fluid, as is our speech.
chrisboyatzis

One, whilst the arguments tend toward extremes here, is there a middle ground? I find “Nobody here seems to look into an Author… if they can avoid it,” to be much more acceptable than, say, “a child should enjoy their toys on Christmas morning.” So is there a middle ground here? Two, I like what Bill Reader said about Coltrane: “He knew the rules of music so well that he broke those rules with frequent and regular brilliance.” I am disheartened not so much by how many students regularly violate rules than that they have no awareness of doing so; they are utterly ignorant of a rule to violate. As a professor (of psychology) I’m obliged to snap them into some awareness of the error of their ways. So an important distinction to me is whether such “mistakes” are made by competent writers (Oscar Wilde, say) or incompetent ones (be they students or gas-station workers who write “no checks excepted”) who are bound together by their ignorance of the rule. The former I can accept and even admire, the latter neither.

dank48

Unless I’ve completely lost it, the original point of the article was “they” for indefinite third-person singular (and by God I’m getting tired of typing that phrase), which some people condemn on the grounds that “they” simply must be plural, regardless of several centuries of its usage by totally competent speakers and writers. “Except/accept” and “you’re/your” are just samples of ignorance and confusion; they are errors that serve no purpose but to advertise the users’ ignorance (and, with a respectful nod to Bill Reader, their laziness about learning the fundamentals, if not their incapacity for learning).

Take another example of “correctness”: it drives me right up the wall to hear or see “convince” used for “persuade,” as in “She convinced him to try a hybrid.” I learned that you convince s.o. that such and such and persuade s.o. to do such and such. “She persuaded him to try a hybrid” and “She convinced him that he should try a hybrid.” Authorities from Fowler to Newman will back me up on this. So what? The rest of the world goes on convincing people to do things without the slightest regard for my preference, and so, as a matter of fact, it should. The rest of the world is not out of step with me.

The OED attests to centuries of use of “they” for the 3rd sing. indef. by perfectly competent people. It’s useful, sexually neutral, and obviously natural as hell, since it came about naturally, not because some authority said so. Not everyone likes it, but they don’t have to.

lenoreb

Well heck, I wish I’d seen those examples when I was still an active professor. I could have avoided the dilemma of deciding whether to intervene and “correct” that usage or just letting it go in despair.

I would have let it go and moved on to something really important, like, what is the subject of this essay, exactly?

Thanks for the citation to Safire.
http://explorationsofstyle.wordpress.com/ Rachael Cayley

Love the phrase ‘faith-based grammar’! Do you distinguish between using ‘they’ to replace ‘nobody’, for instance, and using it to replace a singular generic?

Eg, “The student must finish the first year of the program before they can apply for the fellowship.”

Do you see that ‘they’ as a singular pronoun or as an error? What I am asking is whether you are calling for ‘they’ (and its related forms) to be viewed as having a legitimate singular sense or are you merely saying that nobody (and other such words) isn’t logically singular? Thanks!
http://twitter.com/johnemcintyre John McIntyre

May I add a little gasoline to the fire?

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2012/01/are_you_smarter_than_a_fifthgrader.html
gavin_moodie

I agree with Pullman and go further to use they, them and their as third person singular pronouns in all contexts to avoid the standard gendered singular pronouns. In the Cambridge Guide to English Usage Pam Peters notes that Webster’s English Usage cites numerous uses of singular they, them and their in fiction and non fiction sources dating back to the 16th century.

Peters does not agree with dank48′s whimsical suggestion that there may be an enclave maintaining thou, thee, thy and thine: she writes that the plural you subsumed the singular thee and thou from the 17th century. Peters notes that this lost some precision in the language, partly remedied by the use of you all and youse.

The singular use of they, them and their seems to be following the singular use of you. Some precision may be lost, but if that becomes problematic an alternative will be found.
thenomad

I’m thankful to be a native English-speaker in a context like this. Having taught ESL for a few years, in addition to being friends with many non-native English speakers that like to challenge my knowledge of my language, I find it difficult to justify to such people that they simply need to accept that this is the way things are said because everyone is doing it. (In fact, the other two languages I’ve learned have many more sensible rules than does English!) Far be it from me to argue that any language is logical, but some are definitely less logical than others. I agree that it’s important to know the rules in order to know how to break them–although I still question Dickens’ run-on sentences and poor usage of semi-colons, if he was just poor at constructing sentences or actually knew what he was doing–and I’m frustrated by what I would consider both ignorance and laziness on the part of most people. That is to say they are either too lazy to realise they are ignorant in their use of language or if they do realise it, they are too lazy to do anything about it. Having said that, it’s the latter group funding my proofreading business when they have some extra cash to pay someone else to fix their writing, so I shouldn’t complain!

In any case, because I’ve been a grammar geek all my life, friends and family have sometimes admitted to being afraid that I’ll always be criticising their grammar. I try to explain to them that there is a time for all usages of language. Everyday speech, emails between friends, and other such instances require few definitive grammar rules. I don’t care if they know about number agreements or gender neutral language. If I did, I would also drive myself crazy trying to correct my family from the countryside who frequently say things like “He’d went” and “I seen.” All of that is for formal English usage: essays, journal submissions, public signs, and the like. Without lingua franca, sociolinguistics would be boring. Without the ignorant, proofreaders like me wouldn’t have work. But I still feel sorry for non-native English speakers that approach me and ask why they learned one form in their English class and why they heard it being used differently on the street. These discussions need to be had in more widespread fora, such as ESL teacher training classes, IMHO.

dank48

“German has many rules and a few exceptions. English is the other way around.”

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

German has lots of crazy irregular and logically incomplete ***t. Don’t believe everything you’re told

People usually learn things that get contradicted by their experience because they were taught silly rules by people who, in the best of cases, were going to undertake their first reading of their first book ever on English grammar a good 10 years later (as I was when I worked as an English teacher).
http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

German has lots of crazy irregular and logically incomplete ***t. Don’t believe everything you’re told

People usually learn things that get contradicted by their experience because they were taught silly rules by people who, in the best of cases, were going to undertake their first reading of their first book ever on English grammar a good 10 years later (as I was when I worked as an English teacher).

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1045295912 Charles Purdy

I agree with the blogger’s call for a reasoned approach to grammar (and love the term “faith-based grammar”). The goal of writing is not to follow rules; it’s to communicate effectively and efficiently — the “rules” are in service of that, or they aren’t worth anything. But I’m usually able to write and think my way out of having to use a singular “they” — and I’m usually glad I made the effort, as doing so helps me communicate more effectively. (Also, that way, I don’t get chastising letters from the Miss Higginbotham crowd.)

And even the most ardent grammar descriptivists will draw the line somewhere — that’s why few editors will allow the numeral 2 in place of “to” in our writing, even if the average person is quite comfortable and familiar with this usage.

Further, though I am in awe of Wilde, Austen, and Shakespeare, their use of a construction isn’t proof that the construction is correct or wise today. Language has changed — words’ meanings have changed, the way we speak has changed, and so on. “Austen wrote it, so it’s OK” is also dogmatic.
odarp

Gosh, it looks as though we’ve got Geoffrey Pullum on the
line! If you’re listening, Mr. P., maybe you can answer some questions that
gnaw at me as a copy editor trying to be open minded:

1. If “they” can be singular, why does it always take a
plural verb?

2. Under the descriptivism you espouse, can a usage be
categorized “common (and found even in excellent writers) but imprecise”?

3. Can you allow for the possibility that avoiding the use
of singular “they” can result in clearer, less distracting prose?

A side remark: I’m sure that Lady Bracknell thought of
herself as the summit of grammaticality. I’m not at all convinced that Wilde
intended her to actually be such. In fact, there’s much comic mileage to be
gotten out of the contrast between her self-image and reality.

jffoster

Mr Odarp,
The pronoun you can be and often is singular. But it always takes, in all standard and most nonstandard dialects of English, a plural verb are, were, …. Why doesn’t that bother you?

odarp

I believe most English grammars say that “are” and “were” can be second-person singular verbs as well as plural; they supplanted “art” and “wert.” On the other hand, third-person singular verbs, distinct from the plural, are alive and well, and ready to serve with “they” when “they” is supposedly (indefinite) singular. But I’ve never seen anybody make them do so.
Geoffrey Pullum seems to acknowledge, in his later addition to his post, that this “they” is morphologically and syntactically plural: “’They’ always takes the plural
agreement form, regardless of its meaning; and ‘everybody’ always takes the singular agreement form,” he says. So far, so good; but when he goes on with “That does not mean it’s a contradiction for ‘they’ to have ‘everybody’ as its antecedent,” I think he’s begging his question. In any case, if substantial numbers of the people with whom we are trying to communicate could see it (even subliminally) as a contradiction, isn’t there reason not to use it?

jffoster

No.

Odarp, your opening sentence is exactly my point. ‘are’ and ‘were’ are plural verb forms. See my reply above to airlog with examples that show they are plural verb forms. But they continue to be used with the second person pronoun ‘you’ even when the reference of ‘you’ is clearly only one individual. Now, there is no English singular personal pronoun with indeterminate gender. But gender is unmarked in the plural ‘they’, whence its tendency to cover singular indefinite gender. But it keeps a plural verb form, just like ‘you’ does.

http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

2: precision depends way too much on the context (other sentences) to be a property of a phrase or expression or some structure inside a sentence.
http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

2: precision depends way too much on the context (other sentences) to be a property of a phrase or expression or some structure inside a sentence.

alic8643

I think the real question is who is the audience. And where is the audience. As we all know, the British use a plural verb for collective nouns: (“the couple have five children” vs. Americans who use the singular has). So I would not base an American usage rule on a British writer, especially one who wrote 100 years ago. Language evolves and it is regional. After all, Wilde would have used the word “friend” only as a noun, if at all, never a verb.
gavin_moodie

Oxford dictionaries also allow the singular they -

‘You can use the plural pronouns ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘their’ etc., despite the fact that, technically, they are referring back to a singular noun:

“If your child is thinking about a gap year, they can get good advice from this website.”

“A researcher has to be completely objective in their findings.”

’Some people object to the use of plural pronouns in this type of situation on the grounds that it’s ungrammatical. In fact, the use of plural pronouns to refer back to a singular subject isn’t new: it represents a revival of a practice dating from the 16th century. It’s increasingly common in current English and is now widely accepted both in speech and in writing.’

http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/he-or-she-versus-they
israelp

On the other hand, some avoid “they” even when it is appropriate.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/545827

“Genealogical enthusiasts are spending between US$1000 to US$18000 a year to discover his or her roots.”
mrsnorthernbarbarian

This actually happened at the large state university where my father worked, back in the dark days of snail mail. Being a large state university, this happened with over 400 applicants who got the acceptance packet instead of the rejection letter. But in this case, the university did the right thing: they admitted the students who had gotten the acceptance letters by mistake, and then sent out the other acceptance letters to the students who had been mistakenly rejected. I don’t think that they ever even bothered to tell anybody that they’d admitted 400 people by mistake, and who knows? probably most of them did just fine (given that much of the admissions process is a lot of guesswork — at least the part that isn’t reserved spots for legacies, etc.).

One final note: The admissions office and the IT department are also entirely different; don’t assume that IT had any control over what someone in the admissions office did. When the “IT man” (or woman) shows up to get you connected, just say thank you, and be happy that someone is keeping watch so that your network doesn’t get taken down by trolls.