Conservatives would probably get mad about that too so “they” works just fine
one always thinks of a plurality of people
Speak for yourself! I don’t immediately think plural when “they” is used.
Using “one” yet it refers to multiple people, my days.
IMO only one person is allowed to use the one pronoun: Keanu Reeves
“They” is the traditional English-language pronoun when an unknown person could be of either gender. “Mommy, my teacher said a funny thing at school today!” “Oh? What did they say?”
Teacher is singular, but assigning a gender would feel awkward if one doesn’t know, so “they” is used instead.
This is typical for the English language.
There used to be thou, which was a singular form of you. However, thou also implied you were talking to someone at or lower that you were. Eventually, it became seen as rude to call someone thou, so its usage dropped in favor of a uniform you.
A singular they fits this role, as the gender isn’t defined enough to use he or she and the use of it would be seen as an insult.
Real conversation at my house… Me - You invited your friend, Taylor, to Thanksgiving?
Kid-Yeah, they’re looking forward to meeting you guys.
Me-Oh, is Taylor bringing a date?
Kid- i don’t think so. I told them to come over about 4.
Me- ??? How many chairs do we need??
So, while they singular is correct, it’s also confusing as hell!!
It’s really not, it’s very common usage in the UK.
Typically you can assume a pronoun isn’t introducing any previously unmentioned people, as that is confusing and bad grammar. The only case I would find this confusing is if you thought “Taylor” referred to a group of people like a band.
“Sorry for the confusion. Taylor uses they/them pronouns.”
Confusion lifted, problem solved.
Yeah, that would have helped.
What about this is confusing?
I have no idea how you would be this confused here.
Thou shouldst campaign for the resurgence of a second person singular pronoun as well.
2nd person singular: ya’ll
2nd person plural: all ya’ll
Using “youins” for second person plural is considered archaic.
Why not just pick new words to use?
Because the current word for it works just fine?
And also because when people try to use neopronouns they take as much flak for that if not more. Imagine this same argument: “I’m not used to these newfangled pronouns. Why can’t they just use normal ones?”
We have that in French, the amount of discussions the new pronoun (“iel”, as a mix between “il” et “elle”) is absurd
As someone speaking German, a brutally gendered language, let me tell you, they/them is awesome and I’d love to have something similar in German. There is so much fighting and discussions about “gendern” and it consumes so much energy that could be better spent elsewhere. And conservatives are having a field trip with this.
Looking for a new word is equally as hard if not way harder than using what already works fine.
Yes I would love for the German language to have an equivalent for they/them. It’s also so awkward talking about someone who is non binary and neither uses he/him nor she/her and you always have to refer to them by their name.
“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”
The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.
Thanks!
I have always loved the OED. As a kid I used to sit in the library and just read it. It was always a dream of mine to buy my own copy and just have it the way people used to have encyclopedias.
knock knock Burglar!
That’s a good explanation. English isn’t my native language, and I always found the they/them weird sounding. With that sentence of the customer you made it click for me. Thanks!
i had an English teacher in high school that insisted sentences like this were grammatically incorrect (subject/verb disagreement, number), and should be, “Every customer should be greeted when he or she walks into the store,” or “All customers should be greeted when they walk into the store.”
I found them annoying.
Well said! My go-to example is ‘If someone calls and I’m not here, tell them they can leave a message’ because it covers both they and them in a singular usage.
Sidenote: I also hate the way that some people act like languages are static things, despite the known history of languages to shift and change over time. English is arguably a German creole; we don’t get to act all sanctimonious now.
If we actually followed the “your gender identity is mildly inconvenient to me so should be banned” crowd and made everything unambiguously gendered, language would become far more awkward.
“If someone calls and I’m not there, tell him or her that he or she can leave a message”.
We could start doing this right now – every time
theyhe or she uses the word “they”, insisttheyhe or she repeatsthemselveshimself or herself in a way that leaves no gender ambiguity…
Entering academia early 2000s, I saw people refer to authors of research papers as “they” as a default to sidestep gendering.
On one hand it’s nice to not insert gender where it isn’t needed, but on the more practical hand it wasn’t always possible to tell by name either. European names can have different gender in different regions, or be all Sztrkökla, and names from Asia are even harder to guess.
names from Asia are even harder to guess
Good luck in Cambodia where Samnang and many other names can be used for both male and female names.
You get gender-neutral names in English-speaking countries too, eg Alex, Jordan, and Dylan. It’s just not possible to reliably guess everyone’s gender from their name alone.
I’ve never heard Dylan for women but yes, you’re spot on. Here it’s not such a thing to have gendered names, they just work.
I know a woman called Dylan.
I can think of at least two (female) porn stars with Dylan as their assumed first name.
In Norway there’s like 60 names that have a reasonably even usage between genders.
It is much quicker to understand they as a neutral instead of introducing new language and trying to disseminate that through textbooks. This way, there’s no need for any (or many) edits, we can just maintain existing grammar with new understanding.
English already has another form which refers to singular and plural: ‘you’. I assume that people who suddenly take umbrage are just kicking up a fuss for the sake of it, or simply didn’t stop to think about what they’ve been using all this time.
Sadly, many educational institutions still teach a prescriptive form of English that fails to acknowledge this, but singular “They” is decades older than using “You” instead of “Thou” as a singular second-person pronoun. It was already in common use way back in Shakespeare’s time. If thou thinkst this confusing, change thyself before demanding others change for thine own comfort.
Also, some people are plural, so the ambiguity of “they” is inclusive to them.
Also-also, the only other pronouns in common use that aren’t explicitly gendered are “it/its”, which some people find dehumanizing. Nonbinary and agender folks often (but not exclusively) prefer “they/them” over “it/its” or neopronouns.
Also-also-also, “picking new words to use” is extremely non-trivial for pronouns because it requires the entire English-speaking population to relearn fundamental communication habits. It’s much easier to simply accept the fact that singular they is extremely common.
Also, some people are plural, so the ambiguity of “they” is inclusive to them.
Like the former Queen of England’s royal we?
Yeah!
The Royal “We”, aka the “Majestic Plural”, is the use of a plural pronoun to refer to a single person holding a high office.
For plural folks, using a plural pronoun to reference the multiple persons existing within a single body is also appropriate (though I don’t know if that usage has a fancy name yet~). And when referencing these persons individually, we just use their own pronouns the same as with non-plural folks. 🤓
The first paragraph sounds like the royal we, and the second paragraph sounds like dissociative personality disorder, lol
They’re calling that one “Dissociative Identity Disorder” these days, and it’s clinically distinct from plurality.
DID is usually a trauma response, one marked by memory gaps as the separate personalities are partitioned off from one another. One can’t switch identities consciously, but rather does so involuntarily as a stress response.
Plurality is usually benign and doesn’t involve notable memory gaps as the different alters can be co-conscious and are not strongly partitioned apart. Plural individuals can often switch which personality is “fronting” consciously. Rather than a disorder, it’s an uncommon form of neurodiversity.
Thank you for the correction, it was mostly my mind blending DID and the outdated MPD together.
I guess it is notable form a grammatical perspective, though I can’t say I’d personally put it at the same level as the gender-neutral/singular “they”.
I’d be interested if there’s some sort of biological basis for plurality (as there is with being transgendered, for instance). The wikipedia page describes it as an online subculture, mostly akin to roleplaying (from my impression), so it doesn’t feel like it should be in the same category, lol
I have had a plural friend since before they started building communities for themselves online and the consistency of their identities over the years leads me to suspect that there is a biological basis, but the scientific research on the topic is still in its infancy.
That said, there is some adjacent research that seems to point in that direction. The Internal Family Systems Model is a perspective on psychotherapy that begins with the assumption that all individuals contain multitudes, and works to restore mental balance and harmony by identifying the disparate parts of one’s self and addressing the conflicts between them. There are multiple studies over the last three decades showing therapies based on that model to be effecatious for the treatment of depression, anxiety, trauma, phobias, and other psychological symptoms in some populations, and the practice was formally recognized as being evidence-backed in 2015.
If I’m not mistaken, similar psychotherapies were/are used to treat DID. Generally, it works better to treat the patients as they want to be treated…for instance, treating all identities separately rather than telling them “You are just one person, stop this switching nonsense!” lol
I’m also thinking about this from a more… sociological (?) perspective, where everyone has different “selves” or “masks” for different situations. A work self, a home self, an online self, a friends self, etc… this is completely normal, and everyone does it. Plurality sounds to me like trying to say that these are all distinct individuals, which seems like DID in an extreme case, or a matter of roleplaying (or similar).
I guess I’m still having difficulty grappling what Plurality really is. It almost seems to me like an equivalent to someone deciding to call their inner monologue (something normal) the voice of god (something “special”), and making a community around that.
Me talking at dinner: “Will you pass me the peas?” Cut to 5 people confused about whether I mean just one of them or if I want the whole table to all hand me the peas.
I get why they/them can be confusing because of the plural thing, but we are used to a quirky language. With a little practice, the tone and context clear up nearly all confusion. The rest is as easy or hard as what we have to do with an ambiguous “you.”
PS Sorry to the “yous/yous guys” people. I am not trying to turn a blind eye to you obviously superior usage. It just really ruins my point.
You say “with a little practice,” but there’s no practice needed when it’s already part of our language. I guarantee every English speaker complaining about it uses “they” as a singular pronoun quite often.
I rather enjoy “y’all” as a plural second person pronoun. =D
If you don’t know someone’s gender, what do you call them? Like, what if they present in a really ambiguous way? Or what if you’ve never even met them? Like say you’re about to sit down at a restaurant, and you notice a jacket on the seat, would you tell the hostess, “excuse me, I think the last person to sit here left their jacket.” Or would you just be unable to refer to them because you don’t know their gender?
I love the irony of this comment lol
Unfortunately you’re at least ten years too late in trying to get people to ask themselves this question
You mean 600 years too late.
Nah. Maybe twenty years tops. That so many people fell for the fallacious line of argument you’re thinking of was part of the difficulty in trying to push for any of the various theoretically “better” choices that are still available should humanity unexpectedly swerve in the direction of caring about such things.
What would you say are better? I find singular they much more elegant than a lot of the new words that were made up. The fact that to apply it to a known individual, rather than an unknown individual seems like a natural extension of the usage that has existed for centuries.
I don’t really have a preference myself, but Richard Stallman’s continued insistence that “per” is the right answer is the example that comes to mind.
As he puts it, “most languages have genderless singular third-person pronouns which are distinct from the plural pronouns. English deserves to have them too.”
Perhaps in a hundred years, once the old way of making the distinction is long forgotten, a new one will arise.
Always say “they”. This violates the grammar of English so deeply that it feels terribly wrong. It also results frequently in confusing expressions in which the referent of “they” is unclear.
I totally disagree with this. Singular they has been in use since the 14th century or so. It’s so deeply ingrained in the language that is perfectly simple to understand. In fact I’d say that people who claim to not understand it are doing so intentionally.
Perhaps a new word will develop naturally as you say. But personally I don’t see a need for it.
Not all of the complaints are motivated just by deliberate obstinance. I’m old enough that it was genuinely confusing for me at first in some situations, but young enough that I got used to it after some years. There are still plenty of people out there who haven’t done enough conversing with those who habitually default to “they” to get used to it. Not all of them are as old and cranky as Mr. Stallman.
Are you saying that the singular use of ‘they’ is only about 20 years old?
Obviously it’s been used in some grammatical situations as a singular third-person pronoun since forever. It’s just as easy to come up with example phrases that would not sound in any way odd to a 20th-century person as it is to come up with examples from the 17th century. But its recent popularity as an all-purpose stand-in for “he” and “she” is indeed unprecedented, and even if it weren’t it’d be a notable change.
But it’s not a stand in for he or she. It’s a term to address people when gender is ambiguous.
This is hundreds of years old and not just something that’s come into vogue recently.
Of course it is not that it’s somehow a “stand in for he or she” inherently in current usage. It’s just that it has recently replaced those other pronouns in places where for some time they had held near-universal prevalence among most users of this language.
Just as some people who’ve never known the old ways think those people who still aren’t accustomed to it are putting on an act when they say it’s weird and confusing, I suppose it would be easy for those who’ve lived through the change to mistakenly assume that young people are being disingenuous when they act as if there’s been no change for hundreds of years and there’s nothing to remark on here. If you’re old enough to have seen it happen, the change in usage seems very obvious. If not, perhaps it isn’t.
One does not (always) do this. The singular “they” is many hundreds of years old.
If it confuses you, then I understand your confusion. Please read about the history of the singular “they” in order to resolve your confusion.
https://www.oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-they
Why not choose new words? Languages evolve in a complex way. One reason is that “they” is an easy choice. Another reason is that many speakers react harshly to unfamiliar pronouns, therefore it promotes acceptance to use familiar pronouns in new ways. I wrote with the Spivak pronouns for years, but that led to more distraction than understanding, so when “they” emerged as a standard, I adopted it.
