If you had a little perspective, you wouldn’t crack so easily. Believe you me, English speakers are damn lucky with this whole gender thing. Many other languages don’t have it nearly so good.
German, for instance, has masculine as the default for most human occupations. The basic construction for “the engineer” is “der Ingenieur”. Doctor = “der Arzt”. Lawyer = “der Anwalt”. Professor = “der Professor”. If you want to specify something so crazy as (gasp!) a woman in these professions, then you have to add a little bit more to them: “die Ingenieurin”, “die Ärztin”, “die Anwältin”, “die Professorin”. The masculine and feminine forms form plurals differently, as well, which leads to hilarious orthographical contortions in the effort to be fair.
This isn’t the fault of the people, mind you. They’re are fair as you could hope. It’s just that language changes more slowly than culture, so they’ve had to devise work-arounds. If a university sends an email to all its students, the email might begin: “Liebe Studenten/Innen”, with the slash distinguishing between the plural form of male students and female students. And sometimes in speech, they want to use this, too. So if I were to address the people of Austria, I might begin my speech with: “Liebe Österreicher und -Innen!”
Heh. I chuckle at that every single time.
Anyway, my point is that other people have much bigger problems with this his/her thing, and they are far from an equitable 21st century solution because of the importance of case inflections. The German speakers basically seem to have decided “the hell with it” and use the masculine/neuter pronoun, but this is not without complaints.
Meanwhile, English has had a nice easy solution since Shakespeare’s time or before. If a lawyer is too finicky to use the language correctly, then that’s their problem. Skilled speakers of English settled this issue centuries ago.
Those grammarians who tried to clean English up by making it more like Latin are why people are still taught, and still incorrectly, that double-negatives are wrong (though you still won’t see them in most journalism), that splitting infinitives is bad, and that it’s unacceptable to end a sentence with a preposition.
I’d love to see the Spivak pronouns gain some traction, but absent a move by the MLA and the College Board people to implement something, ain’t nothin’ gonna change.
Words other than pronouns can be the subject of a sentence (thus determining the form of the verb). Gender ambiguity could be a determining factor in some language, but it isn’t in English. If we were talking about a student named Lindsey of unknown gender, we would say neither “Lindsey are a good student.” nor “The student have studied mathematics.” This is because Lindsey is a single entity, thus triggering the use of third person singular verb forms when we speak about em in the third person. The use of this verb form is not tied to certain specific pronouns, but to the third person singular, which is why I think third person singular pronouns should use them.
To be fair, negative concord (i.e., the phenomenon of “double negatives”) truly is absent from many mainstream dialects of English, so that rule, while erroneously taken as an excuse to harangue those who speak other dialects, actually does have some legitimate grounding; it accurately describes those varieties of English (as opposed to the shibboleths about splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions, which don’t accurately apply to any dialect), and never have.
Even given that move, ain’t nothin’ gonna change. To quote Mencken quoting the New York Sun: “The excellent tribe of grammarians, the precisians and all others who strive to be correct and correctors, have as much power to prohibit a single word or phrase as a gray squirrel has to put out Orion with a flicker of its tail.” And we have every reason to expect the same would hold of prescription as opposed to prohibition.
The use of this verb form is tied to a certain class of words which we might call the syntactic third person singular, but that class of words doesn’t need to be tied to the semantic third person singular. (Just as “you” retains syntactic properties indicative of plurality (such as agreeing with “are”), despite being semantically quite capable of referring to a singular entity; my point with having mentioned this before was to show how these syntactic and semantic properties do not need to be so tightly coupled).
For example, I am perfectly well capable of saying “The Chinese army eats a lot of food” rather than “The Chinese army eat a lot of food”, even though the Chinese army is many people. “But this is because you are considering the Chinese army as a single collected unit, rather than many individual people!” you object. Nonsense and word games; I certainly didn’t consciously intend anything of the kind. The only sense in which I did so is just the sense in which I deployed language as above, but this is empty tautology; it doesn’t tell us anything substantive about links between words and meanings. No, what we have here is an example of a syntactically singular term with a referent which can, in this deployment, be fruitfully understood as plural; the syntactic and semantic concepts, though linked, do not have to be so tightly coupled as to outlaw this.
The same holds for “singular they”; yes, it acts syntactically in just the manner of a term with its plural history. That is no bar to its having the semantic property of taking singular referents.
Really, all the academic, theorizing discussion in the world doesn’t matter; the facts of how people speak are the end-all, be-all. If you have a model of the workings of English, and that model doesn’t accurately account for those facts, then it’s that model which needs to be revised, not how people speak. It’d be like a physicist settling on an inverse-cubed law of electrical attraction for his own aesthetic reasons, and then blaming the universe for getting it incorrect.
Of course “they” can be used as a singular pronoun. My point is that it makes for a rather crappy one, by my standards. I want, and am going to use, a different alternative, that I like more.
Languages are not physical laws. They change, and what we’re talking about is not what the language is, but what we want it to become. Languages are not some holy untouchable things that may only be observed from afar; there is nothing immoral about trying to change it to better fit one’s needs.
Right, but changing the fundamental pronoun system of English? You’re not going to impose that extrinsically through guided effort; the scale of the problem is too huge for that. You’re only going to be able to deal with the changes occur on their own through caprices of history. Spivak pronouns will never be mainstream; singular “they” clearly is. The situation may (indeed, will) alter in the future, but not as a result of any tiny group’s campaigning. For all practical purposes, language is something we can only observe; an observed thing which keeps changing, to be sure, but not one whose changes any of us can actually guide, ourselves, to any significant degree.
(Organizations with much more clout have tried it and utterly failed. See how well L’Académie is meeting its goals…)
[I speak of spoken language above (by far, the natural, primary version). It is somewhat more within the realm of plausibility [though still pretty far off for most sweeping reforms, at this stage] that one might actively change the writing system of English.]
[I also speak only of such fundamental changes as, say, overhauling the basic pronoun system. Clearly, one can coin neologisms, help turn uncommon phrases taboo, etc.]
It seems to me that this entire thread is about changing the pronoun system of English :). Singular “they” may be mainstream in some sense, but it’s clearly not mainstream enough for the OP.
Of course no tiny group can change the language by itself. All changes, whether deep or superficial, begin with a single person and spread from there. Change due to direct deliberate campaigning is a very rare way for language to change, but not unheard of. Actually, my nationality may account for a difference of perspective here: Swedish went through some significant (and very rapid) change in pronoun usage during the late sixties and early seventies, and that was certainly a question of an explicit movement for change. The change in question was admittedly considerably smaller than introducing a new pronoun, but still a good long way from insignificant.
It’s not that I think success is inevitable or something silly like that. I just don’t see why one should give up before one starts.
IANAL, but I was once involved in proposing redrafts of the rules of a trade union to avoid gender-biased language, and that was the commonest solution. For example, if you had:
When the General Secretary receives an application for membership, and the application from the proposed member does not specify a branch, he shall assign the member to a branch.
Well, it’s not really ambiguous, but the GS could be a woman, and the word “he” might be referring back to the member rather than the GS, so redraft as:
When the General Secretary receives an application for membership, and the application from the proposed member does not specify a branch, the General Secretary shall assign the member to a branch.
It’s wordy, and you wouldn’t speak like that in conversation, but it’s less ambiguous.
Of course we do: it’s he/him. This is the grammatically correct way , but of course in these times, using such language in a business climate could get you fired…
Like I said, “he/him” is not actually capable of functioning as gender-generic. “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. Or, to cop an example from the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’s, no one would ever say “Either the husband or the wife has perjured himself.”