bored. Watching x-men 2 and listening to an Oxonian vacuum their cell phone
They all have one cell phone? ;p
what do you mean?
You said “their cell phone.” Their implies the object in question belongs to them. Cell phone is a singular noun. Therefore the cell phone belongs to them and there is one cell phone for multiple Oxonians.
**Can someone please verify/clarify the point my friend was trying to make?
**
oh and of course, feel free to see a photo explaining the original statement: http://i.imgur.com/Fy2xe.jpg
“Their” is widely used as a singular pronoun, especially when the person’s gender is unknown. We’re only dealing with one Oxonian, as made clear by the article “an”, and that one Oxonian has one cell phone.
Your friend was being pedantic; ‘their’ is commonly used for the neuter singular, and those authorities which don’t accept it now will do before long, because there’s no real useful alternative.
Besides, an Oxonian sounds like an alien - it could have been a plural entity for all your friend knows.
Oh, and as long as we’re being pedantic, I don’t think “neuter” is exactly what you mean; the neuter singular would be “its.” I’m not sure what the grammatical term is, though: “arbitrary”? “ambiguous”?
The word you’re groping for is ‘unspecified’, but I’m pretty sure ‘neuter’ is the word that works best in that context. The problem with ‘its’ is that it specifies that the thing under consideration is inanimate, so it cannot be correctly used to refer to humans. Singular they does not have that defect.
I think in every case, I’d use “him” or “her” if I knew the gender. “Hir” is a genderless possessive pronoun that hasn’t caught on, from the transgender/genderqueer population, if anyone’s looking for an alternative.
It wouldn’t matter if “Oxonian” were a mass noun. See, for instance, the first use of ‘hir’ in the quoted text.
“Hir” isn’t all that new so much as really old:
That’s a decent example of the same word used for plural and singular forms. Not that we couldn’t have a distinction, but English seems to be doing okay with it.
I think it might be a bit more modern to use singular ‘they’ even when the person is not unspecified, but that’s not all that common either. The OP’s example might be one, given that the person sending the text presumably knows the Oxonian in question.
The English language is a living thing. In the past, we substituted the plural you and your for thou and thy. Now we are substituting the plural they and their for he/she and his/her. What was a minority substitution is becoming common, and converging with political correctness.
‘Political correctness’ and the avoidance of a massive linguistic headache.
Referring to gender-irrelevant others in a reasonable fashion was a major pain in the ass in English. (Still is, in some varieties.) Prior to the acceptance of singular they, we had three options, none of them even minimally acceptable:
[ul]
[li]Just use the masculine: The politically-correct option for certain righties, meaning it pegs the speaker as someone who shares their worldview. (Or it pegs the speaker as someone who is old enough to be dead, statistically speaking.) It’s also a stylistic trainwreck whose only recommendation is tradition, much like Second Empire furniture.[/li][li]Use a circumlocution: ‘His/her’ falls under this banner, unless you can be very clever. The politically-correct option for certain lefties, meaning it pegs the speaker as someone who shares their worldview. It’s also a stylistic trainwreck whose only recommendation is an institutional edict, much like team-building retreats.[/li][li]Make something up: Punt the problem by dropping into another language. Spivak pronouns are an example of this, as is constant use of the feminine. Honestly, you might as well paint your face blue and demand to be addressed as ‘Highest Whichness’ for all the good this option will do you.[/li][/ul]
So the people who actually use the language find a solution; it’s déclassé and horribly incorrect and actually fairly popular, which is the grossest and most unforgivable sin of all. If the proles like it, it must be the worst innovation since the word ‘nice’ acquired its modern meanings and got taken away from the people who are capable of doing things which require its correct usage.
In short: Singular they is already correct English. Whining about correct English is merely a common pass-time among some half-educated types.
