Another plus for technical writing. I get to use the imperative for almost everything.
If one is required to exactly refer to a singular or plural subject, one can use s/he, or the clunky ‘he or she’. Or ‘she or he’. Or one can uses the ambiguous ‘one’, which can be used for any or all ‘persons’.
The possessive can’t be ‘slashed’, so that leaves clunkiness, or “one’s”.
Yeah, sadly I’ve come to terms with doing that. When it really drives me crazy is when I’m writing some general statement of law and I have to either randomly assign a gender to the hypothetical person or endure writing “his or hers” over and over and over again.
I disagree. When used as a gender-neutral singular, “they” and its declensions feel singular and grammatical to me.
Would you use singular verb forms with it? Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do that.
Standard English has coped with the lack of a plural ‘you’ for a while now; it’s only recently adopting various dialectal options as national communications become widespread.
I find there’s very little ambiguity in the singular ‘they’, personally. Oh, sure, you can construct awkward examples all day long, but I find that whenever it’s used in a real context, it’s very clear that it’s a singular ‘they’.
“If someone comes in after the show begins, you’re to help them find their seat.”
“Whichever person becomes Vice President, they’ll have some work ahead of them.”
Watch out, a switch-up!
“When the Miller family shows up, take their coats and show them to their table.”
Here’s the key: pronouns are almost never used without some kind of antecedent, which eliminates the ambiguity. Plural ‘you’ was in fact more of a problem than singular ‘they’, as the antecedent is assumed with ‘you’, and there was a legitimate problem when speaking to the spokesperson of a group, for example. But ‘they’ always requires an antecedent, and if one isn’t provided further communication will clarify, just as if the speaker had used ‘he’ or ‘she’:
“He’s coming tomorrow.”
“Who?”
“Bill, our plumber, remember?”
“They’re coming tomorrow.”
“Who?”
“The guys installing our new AC.” OR “Someone to install our new AC.”
Now, I will agree that Wygtya’s example of using ‘they’ to mask a minor’s gender is awkward. Singular ‘they’ should be used when the gender of the antecedent is unknown, and since this is a known person it feels wrong. The writer of the article should have stuck with ‘the child’ or ‘the minor’, as stilted as that can seem. But when the gender is unable to be known, it’s fine, and the antecedent will clear up any ambiguity.
No, I would not, and I imagine he would not either. But all the same, for many people, it is perfectly grammatical to use “they are” with a singular referent.
No.
Yes, but that’s kind of ignoring my point. In doing so you increase ambiguity while singling out “they” as not being a proper third person singular pronoun like “he” or “she”. Now, maybe you don’t mind that, but it is insufficient for my tastes. I’m looking for a fully featured pronoun that can be used as often and as widely as the others, if one so chooses.
People use singular “you” too, yet they do it without a “singular verb form” (and this is in contrast to previous use, which used “thou”/“thee” and corresponding verb forms for singular 2nd person, and reserved “ye”/“you” with “plural verb forms” (that we continue to use with “you”, though with “you” now serving both as nominative and accusative) for plural 2nd person exclusively).
And it leads to a bunch of ambiguity.
And of course your post does not address the way singular “they” is treated differently from the other third person singular pronoun. The second person pronoun is a bad analogy for that, since there are no masculine or feminine second person singular pronouns that use other verb forms than the gender neutral one.
(When writing “singular verb form” I was of course using it as shorthand for “third person singular verb form”.)
I’ve always used “he/she” or “his/hers”. The reader gets to choose whatever fits.
Is the “/” symbol no longer short for “and/or”? Was it ever, or have I had it made up in my own head since I was a kid?
So, no response to my post, then?
Part of my response to Indistinguishable mostly applies to your post as well: I’m looking for a fully featured pronoun that can be used as often and as widely as the others, if one so chooses.
I’m well aware that context resolves the ambiguity most of the time (I stated as much in my first post). “Most of the time” is less than ideal. Moreover, I’d want to be able to use “they” (like “he” or “she”) in multi-sentence paragraphs/speeches where the bit that establishes context can eventually be quite far away from some of the uses of the pronoun.
No one is going to be able to suggest anything better for you than “singular ‘they’”. If, for whatever reason, you find that not to your liking, then I’m afraid you’re all out of luck: the one major problem all alternative pronouns have, and it’s a showstopper, is that nobody uses them.
Besides, do you worry so much about the potential ambiguity of the word “we” (it can encapsulate the listener, or it can exclude the listener, depending)? Perhaps we should search for a replacement for that as well. All words are capable of being made ambiguous, in contrived enough scenarios, and you don’t have to stretch most pronouns very far to do so. If that’s a criterion of exclusion for you, you’ll have nothing left.
I’m afraid you’ll be searching for a very long time, then. There are very, very few words in common English that are not ever ambiguous at some point or another. For the most part, we make do well enough with words that are clear 95% of the time and cope with clarifying the 5% of the time they’re ambiguous.
“Jeff told Sam he was now a rich man.” ‘He’ isn’t exactly crystal clear here; should we also create a word to distinguish when a pronoun is referring to the object as opposed to the subject of a sentence?
IMO, this is poor writing anyway. The antecedent should be referred to occasionally in a lengthy document, if for no other reason than to change up the word usage. You may be working off a certain style guide that requires this, I don’t know.
Use the masculine and be done with it. If you absolutely need to, put a disclaimer that it refers to everyone but is used solely for convenience.
That’s okay, I’m perfectly capable of suggesting a better alternative to myself :). And it is of course not true that “nobody uses them”. Few use them, sure. Many, many disdain the singular “they” as well; you may have noticed it’s not exactly widely accepted as being proper, especially in published works (which more commonly pick a gendered pronoun, usually “he”, sometimes “she”, sometimes alternating). You can pick a threshold for what number counts as “nobody” in such a way that it puts your preference on the right side and mine on the wrong one, but I have no obligation to respect that.
Of course you need to reestablish context occasionally. But the more ambiguous the words you’re using are, the more often you need to do it, and the clunkier and more repetitive your language gets.
Regarding the rest of your posts: thank you for pointing out that there are other ambiguities in the English language. I am sure this information will help me speak and write better in the future.
However, I still don’t think that ambiguity is a positive thing, and when setting out to change a language I think it is one thing that is nice to avoid.
Also, I am more than a little irritated that you keep harping on the ambiguity thing. Of the two issues I mentioned, it is by far the one that bothers me less.
As I already pointed out, though, this is hardly a problem with singular “they”, any more than it would be a problem with singular “you”. People are perfectly willing to say “Oh, they think they can get away with this, do they?” with a singular referent, just as they are perfectly willing to say “Oh, you think you can get away with this, do you?” with a singular referent.
It’s not a thin line of popularity which separates singular “they” and Spivak pronouns; the difference between their popularity is on the same order of magnitude as the number of native speakers of English itself. You use the former, you might get some prickly pedant turning up his nose. You use the latter, you’ll almost certainly get “Huh? What was that? Did you mean to say something else?”.
(It’s true you have no obligation to respect that, but simply as a practical matter, you may want to consider the above, particularly in light of your goals. If you want to reduce people’s confusion over your words, Spivak pronouns are not currently the way to go.)
I may have been communicating badly, but this does not actually address my issue in any way. The problem isn’t whether singular “they” uses the same verb forms as singular “you”. The problem is whether it uses the same verb forms as the other third person singular pronouns. I think that if it’s supposed to be a third person singular pronoun, it should behave like one. It doesn’t, so I’m not satisfied with it.
It’s not supposed to be a third person singular male pronoun, so it doesn’t have to behave like the third person singular male pronoun. It’s not supposed to be a third person singular female pronoun, so it doesn’t have to behave like the third person singular female pronoun. It is supposed to be a singular pronoun, but that’s ok; not all singular pronouns behave like those two, so if it doesn’t, that’s no great strike against it. Why should it satisfy this particular correspondence?
What is wrong with having “gender ambiguity” (so to speak) be one of the inputs to verb agreement, just as person and plurality are (in a limited way) in English, and just as gender sometimes is in other languages? I mean, that would seem to describe the facts of the matter of many people’s speech.