After approximately the 9,000th time of having to re-write a sentence because the English language has no gender neutral word that means “his or hers” I’ve finally cracked. Honestly, we Anglophones are intelligent people. Were responsible for the lion’s share of humanity’s inventions and innovations over the last two-hundred or so years. So why can’t we make a word to remedy this blatant need? Many people already use “their” in that situation, even though its incorrect. We could just change the rules and make that correct. If that isn’t agreeable, lets just make up another word to fill the need. Its certainly much more logical than to continue to do things in our current asinine way.
Singular ‘they.’ It’s got a long history. It looks incorrect, but it’s been in use since (IIRC) the Renaissance.
Who says “its incorrect”? If it’s being used by literate people, and it’s unambiguous, then it’s correct. If any person says “its incorrect”, then they are wrong.
The rule is being changed due to the bolded part. This isn’t something requiring a Congressional law, only force of popularity.
Exactly.
I should be “it’s incorrect.”
No.
It should be “it’s incorrect.”
(Gaudere’s law is working overtime today)
How much you want to bet **mhendo **proofread, too?
I would use “they” and its forms in such a situation. There’s not really a better option, and it is used often enough by others.
Stop that! You’re going to break Gaudere’s Law!
There have been a number of attempts to introduce a true gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun to replace ‘singular they’, since using ‘it’ doesn’t seem to work for people and animals anymore. I like ‘ey’, ‘eir’, ‘eirs’, ‘emself’, which are obtained by cutting the ‘th’ of the ‘they’ series. Sometimes I even remember to use them.
I would agree with you, but the requirements of my job say otherwise, so i’m stuck.
That sucks. Can you just make everything plural?
I maybe misreading the question, but don’t a number of the romance languages simply default to the masculine in these situations? I know in Spanish a mixed group of people reverts to the masculine, but I don’t remember what else that rule applies to.
not saying that english should do this, just that other languages have problems to.
English used to revert to the masculine as well, but that’s the problem. We don’t want it to. We want it to be neutral, but there’s no accepted way to do that.
Oh I know. I agree with that. I was just referencing the fact that he directly addressed the english language in the thread title.
A mixed group is a different situation from “his or hers”/“he or she”/etc.; at any rate, it’s not really significantly true that English ever “reverted to the masculine” for the latter sort of thing. “Right now, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden are competing to become the next Vice President of the United States. Whoever wins, I’m sure he’ll do a great job.” could only be said as a kind of joke.
Sadly no. I’m a lawyer, so everything has to be exact or I’m in some serious trouble.
Well, that’s you’re problem. Lawyers don’t speak English. They speak Lawyer. Those of us in the English speaking world are getting along just fine with “they.”
Shouldn’t it be, “It should be ‘It should be “it’s incorrect.”’”?
I agree with the OP. I hate that there is this word missing in our language. A recent local newspaper article used “they” repeatedly to refer to a minor who testified in court. I found it really confusing and kept rereading the thing to see how many people were on the stand. Of course, the journalist was trying to protect the privacy of the minor to the extent of hiding the gender of the child, but I was frustrated.
However, as a fellow lawyer, I know that you can use the cumbersome but accepted substitutes of “the Defendant/Plaintiff/Respondant” or “Insert Last Name Here” ad nauseum. I hate it, but everyone knows who you are talking about.
There are two problems with singular “they” (or two different ways a single problem expresses itself). The first is one of ambiguity: if I use it, am I talking about a single person (of unspecified gender) or several? One can usually tell from context, but not always, and the existence of separate singular and plural pronouns kind of implies we want to be able to express this difference.
The other is one of grammatical congruence. Spot the errors:
“He is cute, she is cuter, but they is cutest.”
“Oh, they thinks they can get away with this, does they?”
You can’t use singular verb forms with “they”, which really makes it stand out alongside “he”, “she” and “it”.
I think this is a large part of the resistance to universal adoption of “they” as a singular pronoun. It doesn’t feel like a singular, and if you try to treat it as such, it feels severely ungrammatical.
And that’s why I, like Sunspace, prefer “ey/em/…” (aka Spivak pronouns).