“Proper”, and sounding awful.
The idea that anyone, myself included, ever said on this thread that it was a recent change, or in fact, a change at all, is complete nonsense.
You guys seem to bite before you think, and criticize/attack thoughts that were never expressed in the first place. Lighten up 
And I did have the impression that Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source, and have in fact read dozens of posts on other threads that decried it as a source of information. The fact of the matter, as it turns out, is that we have very, very little evidence of how ordinary people talked six/seven centuries ago. What writing survives was in deliberately elevated style, purposely not using the common argot, as those who could write–and read–were usually members of an intellectual and social elite. So the Wiki article is full of it when it claims that anything about common language usage then is known. In any case, I don’t really care–and the question I asked had nothing to do with–how people spoke in 1350.
I do know that the APA style manual dodges the question by suggesting, as per a previous responder, that the antecedent of the pronoun be pluralized whenever possible. This obviously won’t work in all cases.
The reason it feels “natural” to you to use “they” that way is that such usage is well-entrenched in the vernacular. However, were you to publish a manuscript, especially in an academic field, it would be clearly incorrect. Formal language is always a step behind the vernacular, but the common usage eventually grabs the formal usage and drags it down with it into the mud, if you like. I personally have no objection whatsoever to the “they” pseudopronoun. It fills a logical gap in the language, one created by the custom that “it” can only refer to objects. Nonsense, it said.
I also wonder if, when “they” becomes acceptable this way, using “they” when there clearly IS a gendered antecedent will be considered impolite/inaccurate/insulting.
A bit of 14th c:
This carpenter hadde newe a wyf,
Which that he lovede moore than his lyf;
Of eighteteene yeer she was of age.
Jalous he was, and heeld hire narwe in cage,
For she was wylde and yong, and he was old,
And demed hymself, been lik a cokewold.
Not that hard to get the gist - Though to hear it would sound like a foreign language.
The final stanza:
The folk gan laughen at his fantasye;
Into the roof they kiken and they cape;
And turned al his harm unto a jape.
For what so that this carpenter answerde,
It was for noght, no man his reson herde.
With othes grete he was so sworn adoun
That he was holde wood in al the toun;
For every clerk anonright heeld with oother.
They seyde, “The man is wood, my leeve brother”;
And every wight gan laughen at this stryf.
Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf,
For al his kepyng and his jalousye;
And Absolon hath kist hir nether ye;
And Nicholas is scalded in the towte.
This tale is doon, and God save al the rowte!
How about “We know there was another person in the room when Smith killed Jones. We need to find them and get their testimony so we can convict Smith.”
So? A few hundred years ago the word eyes was regarded as improper English and sounded awful to purists. But you don’t see anyone nowadays suggested we revive the word eyen.
A living language changes. It drops some things and creates others. At the moment, the English language doesn’t have a gender-neutral singular pronoun for people. So we’re in the process of creating one.
“They” is even used this way in the latest NIV, a translation made by Bible scholars. This was based on actual linguistic studies showing that this is the most common form for the indeterminate personal pronoun, even in more formal contexts.
It’s not wrong, and any question based on the premise that it is is meaningless.
Sorry. It is grammatically wrong in current standard English. A pronoun must agree in number with their antecedent. (That was a joke, son.)
I think the primary reason that the "singular they"construction is considered erroneous is that so many people, in writing and in speaking, make persistent basic grammatical errors. Thus, someone using “singular they” quite often makes other pronoun/antecedent, subject/verb, etc. errors–and you therefore can’t hand out credit to someone using it that they are simply writing in the vernacular. That said, I do believe that “singular they” will be widely accepted quite soon. When my students use it NOW, however, they get marked down for doing so–because it’s incorrect. They are often astonished when I tell them so (or when I tell them that “she’s like…” is not a good substitute for “she said”).
If a native speaker says it, it’s grammatical. That’s really the only hard and fast rule out there. Everything else is secondary.
It’s also important to understand that there is a difference in usage between “she said” and “she was like”. If I say “she said ‘x’”, then I’m reporting her exact words. If I say “she was like ‘x’”, then I’m conveying the sentiment of what she said, but not the exact words. If you look closely at what your students are saying, there’s a good chance that you’ll see something like this.
Right. You didn’t say it was a recent change, you said it was a change that was likely to happen in the future. That is so much more in accord with the facts. :rolleyes:
Thy grammar is abominable, and I thinks thou shouldst return to thy schooling, before thou makest a fool of thyself.
Tralfamidor is right to gig students for this. They’re in class to learn the rules. Only after they’ve learned what the rules are, can they make informed decisions on when to break them.
Nitpicks: “I think” is a barbaric neologism, and “I thinks” is just an error. Secondly, I suspect that “makest” should be subjunctive, as it’s a hypothetical. The sentence should be:
“Thy grammar is abominable, and me thinks thou shouldst return to thy schooling, before thou make a fool of thyself.”
Yeah, ‘I think’ and ‘methinks’ collided in my head (mostly because I couldn’t decide if I wanted to make the whole sentence archaic, or just the second person parts), and I never even noticed they’d gotten tangled, resulting in THAT.
The make/makest mixup was just a straight up error on my part, though.
Oh, I understand the distinction. I think it’s intellectual laziness more than anything else, though, rather than an attempt at nuance. If you say, “She’s like, OOOOOOOH!” then you don’t have to say, “She was angry.” By using this form of speech, in other words, you can act out what the other person was saying/doing rather than search your cobwebby adolescent brain for an adjective.
This actually can be a rather effective form of communication in some contexts, but then I see my students struggling to convey concepts because they are so used to using the “like” construction that they can’t actually describe anything any more. “Captain Ahab, he’s like, arrrr, I’m gonna kill that whale, and he’s like, I so can’t think about anything else, and he’s like, Ishmael, grab that harpoon willya…”
If a native speaker says it, it could still be ungrammatical–that speaker could be misusing whatever the prevailing grammar might be, including standardized colloquial usage. Rules do exist; even if those rules change, they do change into other rules.
And relax, I do compensate for my students being mostly intellectual voids who have grown up thumbing little electronic devices instead of reading or writing, and thus are as skilled at using the English language as I am at flying a space shuttle. When they do squeeze out an articulated thought, I reward them lavishly.
Wow, what a silly argument. You are criticizing me for saying that something is likely to happen and then rolling your eyes because I couldn’t provide any factual proof of that–in other words, no videos from my trip into the future in my time machine.
What I do know–FACTUALLY–is that colloquial usage of language almost always becomes “mainstream,” and eventually accepted as “proper,” after a certain amount of time. My question dealt with not whether or not the change would occur, in fact, but how long it would take. I consider the change a fait accompli (look it up).
I am rolling my eyes right now, without the assistance of an emoticon.
No, a native speaker, perforce speaks with good grammar. They may be using the wrong dialect or register for the situation and if so, as a teacher, it is absolutely within your purview to provide correction.
But people do not come up with syntactical structures out of the blue. They synthesize them from the speech of those around them. If a student has a habit of using double modals, it’s not because they have bad grammar, it’s because their family and peers use double modals.
Oh, sure. But one of the major reasons we put kids in English classes in the first place is to keep them, as much as possible, from mimicing the speech habits of the dipwads around them, even if only to a small degree, or if only in their writing. At the very least, they need to know how to write a college admissions application letter that doesn’t start with, “I want to like, go to your college because it’s awesome.”
And this may be picking nits, but my students, with a few exceptions, are indeed native speakers of English and their grammar is terrible, so they don’t speak with good grammar “perforce” or any other way. I do wish to draw the distinction between their grammar errors per se and the grammar errors embedded in Teenspeak. To the extent that Teenspeak is an established dialect, those inherent errors aren’t truly errors as such (any more). The error is in using Teenspeak in situations where it’s inappropriate.
“I want to like, go to your college because it’s awesome.” displays no grammatical errors.
I want like, go to your college because it’s awesome.
I want to like your college because it’s awesome, go.
Go to your college because it’s awesome, I want to like.
Those are ungrammatical sentences.
English classes exist to teach Standard English and the occasions where its use will be required. You make my heart sad.