I don’t doubt that it has been your experience, or the experience of many others. I do doubt that this represents an accurate view of usage trends for the word “they”, which as noted by @crowmanyclouds has been in use for literally hundreds of years; this seems like a Mandela Effect situation, where enough people crowing about how disruptive a change this is to the English language creates the false perception that this usage of “They” is new.
I’m sure you have! I have as well. And like @puzzlegal, I have also at times been confused by the ambiguity of “you”, or the ambiguity of “arms”, or “see”, or any of a thousand other English words.
Hebrew applies genders to inanimate objects. Yes, there actually is a Hebrew language department that makes recommendations on the proper usage of Hebrew (and creates Hebrew words to replace foreign loan words); but no one listens to them. Words get gendered based on what sounds right. When you are a native speaker of a language that genders inanimate objects, that makes sense to you; I have no clue how to explain it to a native English speaker.
It looks wonky to me, because it looks like a pronoun without an antecedent. You get situations like this when describing the actions of several people of the same gender: “She told me who she talked to at school today to help her to improve her math grade.” That could be anywhere from one to three people. Antecedents would make it clearer, but sometimes to convey information like this, you need to use names a little more than you would if one of the people were male. Even still, you might need some names stuck in to make it absolutely clear. It would be perfectly clear with pronouns alone only if you happened to have one who prefers “she,” one who prefers “he,” and one who prefers “they.”
I’d like to think that my pronoun preferences are fairly easy to tell. I do have the term dude in my screen name. I know I’ve referred to myself using my real first name quite a few times over the last 20+ years (and I’ve only ever met one female who has the same first name, but three male Oscar winners right off the top of my head).
I hope I haven’t confused anyone about my sex by my fairly frequent referrals to my husband, but if someone is unsure, I will not be offended by the wrong pronoun, or by the pronoun that shows they are unsure.
To the OP and one or two others: get over yourselves. You are not the arbiters of correct grammar or customary usage.
In English, there are some objects that are sometimes gendered. This is generally done for sentimental reasons. For example, referring to a ship as a “her”.
In Hebrew at least (not sure about say French but I would guess it is similar), that’s not really the reason why words have genders. You used the example of the Internet; in Hebrew, most people say “Internet” in an Israeli accent, אינטרנט. But if you asked the Academy of the Hebrew Language, they say “Mereshetet”, or מרשתת, from the root “Reshet”, net.
Mereshetet is female while Internet is male. So clearly the gender of an object is not based on any actual properties of the object; it’s purely grammatical.
So how is it determined? Well, grammatical gender impacts two things: what form adjectives take (for example, Gadol - big male, vs Gdola, big female) and the suffix you use to make the word plural (usually -ot for female and -im for male).
An object’s grammatical gender is purely baed on what suffixes and adjectives sound better with that word.
Sometimes there are exceptions. So chair, kise - becomes kisaut, using the female plural suffix, but uses the male form of adjectives - kise gadol, not kise gdola. Which means many large chairs are kisaut gdolim, not kisaim gdolim or kisaut gdolot.
Eta: one more note - sometimes you get a word that seems like it uses the wrong gender, but then you break the word down and see that maybe it ends in -ut but has a very clearly male root word, so it keeps using male adjectives even in the modified form.
Like I said, it’s something that is very difficult to explain to someone who is not a native speaker, especially if their native language doesn’t give objects genders. It is so notoriously difficult for foreigners to get right that mixing up gendered objects with the wrong adjectives is a common part of impressions meant to portray foreigners speaking Hebrew.
I have no idea if French is similar or not, but there it is.
When the party first starts, and the number of attendees is one, life is simple. In person, you can often either glean or agree upon, appropriate pronouns for one another.
Once the bus shows up, though – IRL or online – antecedents always get squirrely; often pronouns aren’t the best club in the bag no matter what.
Amusing -- to me -- "Big Bang Theory" anecdote
Leonard: What did Penny mean, you’d make a cute couple?
Sheldon: Well I assume she meant that the two of you together would constitute a couple that others might consider cute. An alternate, and somewhat less likely interpretation, is that you could manufacture one. As in, oh look, Leonard and Lesley made Mr and Mrs Goldfarb, aren’t they adorable.
Leonard: If Penny didn’t know that Lesley had already turned me down then that would unambiguously mean that she, Penny, thought that I should [ask] her, Lesley, out, indicating that she, Penny, had no interest in me asking her, Penny, out. But because she did know that I had asked Lesley out and that she, Lesley, had turned me down then she, Penny, could be offering consolation. That’s too bad, you would have made a cute couple. But while thinking, good, Leonard remains available.
Sheldon: You’re a lucky man, Leonard.
Leonard: How so?
Sheldon: You’re talking to one of the three men in the Western hemisphere capable of following that train of thought.
[Can I offer anyone a mixed metaphor … while I’m up?]
Yeah, academics tried to do that. And as often happens with language, everyone completely ignored the language that academics were trying to artificially create, and came up with a solution on their own. What everyone came up with was singular “they”.
Indeed, singular indefinite “they” is very old, but singular definite “they” is new. So it’s new, so what? Language changes.
No, because that implies that y’all is some quaint dialect word that those funny-talking people down South use instead of the correct you. When in fact y’all is a thoroughly cromulent second-person plural pronoun. It’s a contraction of you all, and is perfectly legal by the rules of English grammar. All y’all is an intensifier, when you’re referring to a large crowd.
From where I sit, it appears that y’all and you guys are the strongest contenders to eventually become the standard English second-person plural pronoun. I like y’all, but that’s because I’ve used it all my life.
Sorry to get vociferous, but the misuse of y’all is a linguistic pet peeve of mine.
Yes, someone may have mentioned their gender 203 times on this board; and I may not have read any of those posts, or I may have read most of them but still not, at the moment, have them associated with the specific poster in my head.
And, if you click on my avatar, you’ll see that although I’m female I have no objection to being referred to as “they/them”. I’m only going to correct people if they refer to me as male. @colinfred, I notice that you haven’t bothered to list your pronouns there; so many people haven’t that I often forget to check, but when I do it often doesn’t help.
Exactly.
WTF?
I’m not talking about referring to a generic person. I’m talking about having no idea what gender, for instance, @colinfred is. (And no, having “fred” in there does not make it clear.)
You could put it in your profile in such a fashion that it shows when someone clicks on your avatar. (You might do your general location while you’re at it.)
Unfortunately Discourse offers no option for making such things visible without clicking.
I don’t see how a specific thread would help – I’m unlikely to memorize every single post in such a thread, even if I realize that the thread exists; and not everybody’s even going to do that. I may be able to remember that you yourself are female, due in part to a certain coincidence about people close to me and your username.
I am not trans and I very strongly prefer “they” to being misgendered as male.
I’m old enough to remember spending decades fighting to change the supposedly-inclusive male while being told that it was silly to do so.
It wasn’t silly then, and it isn’t silly now.
(I also remember decades of people complaining about the genuine clumsiness of “he or she”; a problem very neatly solved by “they”.)
In addition, the avatars are too small for me to see clearly, even when the text is at a comfortable reading size. Some of them are still hard to distinguish if I click on them to enlarge.
Yeah. That’s why I object to being called male; because I’ve lived most of my life with that default.
I suspect that this depends drastically on one’s social group.
If you hear someone doing this – consider the possibility that in their social group it’s normal and polite.
People have been trying for decades. None of them ever took off into general use. Singular “they” appears to have done so. I’ll settle for it. (For “they”, that is. I don’t think using “it” for the purpose works very well at all, except possibly for infants, for whom it used to be normal.)
No it’s not.
A) the avatar’s a blur for me, looks vaguely like a skull b) I don’t know how a female ork’s supposed to look different from a male one c) there are plenty of reasons why a woman might have a male-appearing avatar (or, for that matter, a male-appearing username). Nobody expects an avatar to actually be a picture of the poster.
Hell, I made up inclusive and exclusive “our”; and reflexive possessives – a possessive form that’s only used when the relationship is or ought to be mutual. (We say “my shoe” and “my spouse” and “my land”. I think there’s an underlying problem there.)
Just to clarify, the thing I was referring to was saje “correcting” her own post even though what she wrote in that post was completely generic and thus did not need correcting. I wasn’t saying that “not knowing sombody’s gender” was disingenuous.
Also to clarify, it wasn’t the “maleness” of David I was talking about, I was referring to the specificity. I should really have used Alex.
I assume he was making a joke about that being a Warhammer ork and Warhammer being a male dominated hobby. Which is another instance of male defaultness in the wild, and makes that hobby space and many like it notoriously hostile to women (although this is slowly changing, with encouragement from Games Workshop and similar companies that drive these hobbies, which have been trying to push inclusiveness - in an effort to grow their market, I assume).
It gets even weirder when you consider the underlying etymology of “husband” and “wife”. Husband originates from the word for a farmer specifically in the sense of “person who manages the resources of his land” (see: husbandry) while Wife originates from the word for “woman”.
You deliberately chose to put your limits on speech in the About the message board forum to make it the RULE
That takes balls should I call you SIR or Masser?
Someone upthread mentioned ‘xe’, which is rare but not unheard of. I tend to use ‘zey’ which seems similar enough to the time-honored singular ‘they’ to be understood, yet distinct enough to provoke a moment’s thought. While I will not knowingly mis- or disgender an individual who has expressed a specific preference, I will often use zey for a generic human in my response to a discussion that IMHO lends too much or inappropriate significance to gender.
