Many, if not most people use the plural pronouns they/them/their when what they mean to use is the indefinite pronoun. Example: “The student who wants to pass the test should study their textbook” or “When I interviewed the witness, they said they hadn’t noticed what color hair the driver had.”
This is horrid grammar, but it comes about because we don’t have a true indefinite personal pronoun as such; we have to use the crutchy him/her, he/she, his/hers, etc. My question is this: as some point, the “they” usage will become so common that lexicographers and grammarians will be forced to admit that it is “correct” (and just what that term means is a subject of debate in and of itself). When do you think this will occur? Such changes in the pre-electronic age usually took a couple of generations; in the 20th century, they took place in decades; you would think that with the current explosion of communication technology, it might take place in less than a decade.
There are two forces at work on the English language, and they pull in opposite directions. Globalization creates standardization; ease of communication gives dialects and colloquialisms more power. I’m curious as to just what our language will look/sound like in 30, 50, or 100 years. Thoughts?
The OP seems to start from the assumption that using “they” in this fashion is some sort of patch someone came up with when they couldn’t find a better way to express gender-indefinition in the singular. Per previous threads in these boards (which I’m not going to search for, as the search terms I can think of are too common), it was the general indefinite pronoun back when people spake in thees and thous. Polysemia is not “horrid grammar”.
Also, language is logical but its logic stems from hundreds of years of accumulated personal logics: no natural language will never match an individual’s own internal logic. As for what the final question turns out to be, it’s asking for opinions but they’re kind of high-brow, so I’m asking the mods to move this out of GQ (which is for factual answers).
Honestly? I think language will fracture in one sense. Various cliques are going to develop their own jargon reinforced through the ability of the internet to segregate groups. At the same time, I think that the awareness of language change is going to force a slight stagnation in the formal registers as everyone becomes acutely aware of the beginnings of changes that would otherwise grow unnoticed.
You seem to misunderstand the question I’m raising on several levels. I never said that “someone came up” with this usage; in fact, the truth (which, it being obvious, I didn’t bother to state) is that no one decides on changes in usage; they just happen. I was curious as to the length of time before such a tipping point happens and whether that length of time is tending to be shorter and shorter.
It’s a bit anal to ask the mods to move a thread simply because you don’t like the way a question is posed, or the type of answers it might generate (I think they just may, just might, just maybe have better things to do). Many people (yourself included, it seems) think that questions about language/linguistics, those not being “hard” sciences, can’t be answered with “factual answers.” I would like both opinions AND citations of any academic work on the subject, in fact. I can’t imagine anyone thinking my question doesn’t belong in “General Questions.”
Since you are asking for opinions as well as facts, and specifically asked for “thoughts” in the OP, I actually think this is better suited to IMHO. You can get facts in IMHO as well as in GQ.
Steven Pink in his classic, Language Instinct argues that in fact, it is not “horrid grammar.”
For the question of how long this will take to change into universal acceptance, I’m guessing a long time. *Language Instinct *was published in 1994 and we’re still arguing about it.
Facebook adopted this approach, using “they/their” in the singular sense when a user doesn’t specify a gender. It sounds clunky and imprecise, and looks like sloppy programming to me:
Whose status did Ben update?
Did Katie share some unspecified third-party group’s photo?
This sounds clunky because the reader knows that Ben should be a male and Kattie should be a female and so the reader is going to expect a singular pronoun.
From my cite above:
The usage by Facebook clearly falls into the “referential” pronouns that Pinker is discussing. As such, we expect a “his” or “her” or “his/her.”
A good point. A lot of people don’t know that you (and ye, your, and yours) used to be exclusively plural. If you were talking about one person, you’d use thou, thee, thy, and thine. Time passed and thou, thee, thy, and thine (along with ye) got dropped and you, your, and yours became the accepted words for both singular and plural (and in the case of you, both nominative and objective).
So there’s no reason why their couldn’t make the same switch and go from being an exclusively plural possessive pronoun to a general possessive, both singular and plural. Given the old th- theme of thou, thee, thy, and thine, you could even argue it makes linguistic sense.
Just because more precise terms exist, their use need not be mandatory.
Nobody would claim that “Ben is a person” is bad English just because it’s possible to say “Ben is a man”.
The same thing could be true with the use of his, her, and their. You could use his or her in cases where the gender is clear and their when the gender is not. And all of these uses would be proper.
This is horrid, but not because of the use of “their”, but because of the use of “the student” to mean students in general. A much better version, that solves both problems, would be “Students who want to pass the test should study their textbooks.”
This example is also quite peculiar. Why is the speaker being so coy about the gender of the witness?
And is “their” a pronoun? I think it is an adjective.
In general, though, the use of “their”, and of associated pronouns like “they” and “them” as singular, gender-neutral words is well established in the language, and seems the best of the available alternatives. It only very rarely risks causing confusion, and confusing constructions can easily be avoided, with a bit of care. I am fairly sure its use is not increasing: if anything, in recent times it has begun to be pushed aside (just a little bit) by awkward constructions and neologisms, such as “he or she”, “s/he”, and “jhe”. IMHO, that i a bad thing.
Of course we do have a well established, and commonly used, non-gendered singular pronoun in English: “it”. It seems disrespectful to use it of people, however.
I blog about linguistic phenomena upon occasion. (Because, like, what else can you do outside academia with a Linguistics master’s?) Here’s my take on generic singular:
I notice the commenter on that post suggested coming up with a new word for the gender neutral singular, which makes me laugh.
There’ve been multiple coinages to fit that role, and using any of them (E, Ey, Zie, Sie, etc, etc, etc) is about the only thing that gets certain people madder than using the singular they…
I am amazed and enlightened by this. One thing I do know is that it feels completely natural to me to use “they” in such a context. Maybe I shouldn’t be amazed. I think the point has already tipped.
We had a grad student who was undergoing a sex change (M–>F) operation and insisted we use only “they”/“them” to refer to them (at least until the transition was complete). Decidedly non-standard. So far.