Familiar but of unknown gender? We seem to be in a Saturday Night Live sketch with this one.
I think the correct form in this situation is “Pat needs to return to mumble seat.”
I personally favor “h’orsh’it”:
Nice. I’ve always done “s/h/it” when I was feeling cheeky.
Just today I ran across this set of abominations while completing a feedback survey as part of my boss’s evaluation (I’ve changed his name but nothing else):
::shudder::
Zynga games does this when making announcements on Facebook:
“Betty Sue just added 14 palominos to their ranch!”
Even though to play the game you have to give them permission to access your gender among other information, they couldn’t be bothered to write software to acknowledge it. Kind of annoying.
The conventional singular “they” (for undefined persons) is attested all the way back to Chaucer, so it’s neither “slang” nor “politically correct.”
I should also point out that there are a number of people who prefer to be referred to as “they” for gender reasons.
So how would you solve the problem?
What am I missing? If the software has access to the gender you’ve put on the record on Facebook, then the software can be written to use gender-appropriate pronouns.
I’ve always wondered why Facebook does this as well. To me, singular ‘they’ when used to refer to a definite individual does sound wrong.
That’s the thing—the definiteness of an individual is where singular they rubs the wrong way. Otherwise, I think it’s fine and the best way to maintain gender neutrality and fairness to everyone.
There is a substitute for “his or her.” I use it all the time: “Her or his.” You’d be surprised how quickly you can get used to using it. Neither usage is all that awkward.
Wouldn’t it be easy if “correct” English grammar were just a matter of what sounds right or whatever people want to use! Certainly the language changes all the time, but it takes writers and linguistic scholars to declare the boundaries formally broken. I credit Normal Mailer for using a split infinitive in the first sentence of one of his books with actually going where no man had dared to go. Star Trek did a lot to get us used to hearing “to boldly go” in popular culture, but Mailer made such a usage very intentionally.
Are we really ready for: “Me and him borrowed Toby some money”? Shudder
I wouldn’t advise any freshman English students to try to use a singular they in English 101. From time to time you may have an upper level professor who believes in descriptive English rather than imposing rules. But for the most part, you have to know the rules first.
By the way, as a matter of style: "Different from, not different than
Split infinitives date back to, oh, the 13th or 14th century in English. The idea that infinitives shouldn’t be split is just some silly superstition. Wordsworth did it. Donne did it. Twain did it. George Eliot, Robert Burns, Byron, Wilde, etc… I’m not sure why you would single out Mailer for it. Splitting an infinitive in English is completely and utterly unremarkable.
Anyone should be able to remember to never split their infinitives. 
It should really be “seats”, plural, at the end. Unless all the passengers share one giant seat. But otherwise, okay.
I think this mainly sounds wrong because we wouldn’t normally know a person’s name without knowing their gender. (Oops, I might be getting a little meta here.) Imagine, instead, someone in the crew notices an empty seat in the front row that had been occupied. They (sorry) might say, “Someone in the front row still needs to return to their seat.”
Basically, singular “they” works when speaking in the abstract, or of an unknown individual.
… and with an albatross, no less!
… but Anne did it More.
… while thinking about the Mysterious Stranger, no doubt.
I would say that people change language, so effectively, it is whatever people want to use (but as a group, not as individuals) - linguists merely acknowledge those changes, and they certainly don’t do so unanimously or simultaneously. But the fact of the matter is that no one really cares. The vast majority of people will never read up on linguistics and it is precisely they who define the language. It really is quite democratic.
Yeah, when it comes to getting good grades, the easiest rule is that your teacher is always right. Just do what they say and move on with your life. But when they leave the classroom and start telling people how to talk, it doesn’t work as well
And it is that easy for most people. It’s hard for people who want to describe and study language (linguists) and people who bind themselves to arbitrary rules (prescriptivists).
Why? Who says so? By what authority do they say it?
Fascinating discussion.
The usage of ‘they’ as a singular seems to me to be a replacement for the phrase ‘him or her’.
The injunction against splitting an infinitive may be traced back to the syntax of Latin.
This is also the probable origin of the rule that states that one must never end a sentence with a participle.
“This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put.” Winston Churchill
That’s probably a linguistic urban legend. See here.
By the time I was in high school (early 90s), there wasn’t a single English teacher who was spreading that “don’t split infinitives” nonsense as a “rule.”
I have always held that the singular “they” is the solution to the “his or her” problem that does the least violence to the language, and should therefore be the solution adopted. To the extent that it makes language less precise, it is an acceptable trade-off.
The Canadian Department of Justice agrees with you (although I go farther than they do in that I believe that “themself” is a perfectly acceptable reflexive for singular “they,” just like “yourself” is the reflexive of singular “you,” which was originally plural and still is in its construction).
On Reddit the other day someone posted “Can anyone else ‘crack’ their erect penis?”
If ever there were a time to play the percentages and risk using his. . .