Yeah, I’m fine with the progression you describe, although I don’t currently use “they” for people of known binary gender; maybe I should start doing that to help get us to that non-gender-specific default faster.
It’s kind of suboptimal that non-gender-specific singular “they” is the same word as plural “they”, but then again, the same is true for singular and plural “you”, and that hasn’t destroyed the English language yet. Maybe “she/he/ze/xe” etc. will just quietly end up in the linguistic archaism dress-up box next to “thee/thou”.
ETA: O/T, I also really want to know what the hell is the context for the quoted example phrase “everyone has their floors”. Why floors? I mean, yes, there is generally a floor of some kind under anybody who is not currently jumping out of a plane or something, but it sounds weird to specify that?
Personally, i am looking forward to “they all” catching on as the plural.
Also, as a cis boomer with a crappy memory, i can confirm that if you make an attempt, and correct yourself without making a fuss when you mess up, people continue inviting you to their parties and stuff. No one expects you to be perfect.
I was coming in to post something similar. It’s nice to be able to say “Sally and John went to dinner. She ordered steak and he had a salad.”, but if there is a standard non-gendered pronoun that would be fine (heck, let’s use the same one for first/second/third person, it doesn’t really matter for understanding). Plus, of course, Sally may have decided that their preferred pronouns are he/him.
I really would like to keep a plural form. “You” is actually a case study of why - people need to specify whether they are referencing a group or a member of group when they say “you need to jump off this bridge”. Which of course is part of what leads us to “you all”.
Right, to me, the name change sounds slightly more appropriate, not mostly because of the removal of “woman” which isn’t bad itself, but more because of the inclusion of “abortion”. But if I saw it out of the blue I would assume it would do things like smuggle people out of Texas to get safe abortions rather than help them financially.
I could not be a more committed progressive, pro-gay, pro-transgender person, but I cannot keep up with the fucking glossary of correct terms, goddammit. I’m trying! I want to help, but holy fuck! It’s like a secret club pass where they change it every week. And then you’re in trouble!
“That’s not the word we use.”
“It was LAST week!” …
I know I’m an old cis-white motherfucker, but don’t give me shit because I didn’t know the right term! RuPaul got into shit for saying ‘tranny.’ RU FUCKING PAUL! RuPaul, who laid down on the barbed wire of discrimination throughout the 70s and 80s so this generation could run across her back and yell at her for saying ‘tranny’! What the fuck?! I will always change. I will always try to learn the new terms. But you’ve gotta give me some wiggle room.
I’ve had people correct my vocabulary more times than i can count. And yeah, i can’t keep up, either. But no one has ever been nasty about it. Just, they tell me they prefer something else because… Sometimes they even acknowledge it’s a change.
There’s not a cabal of LGBT activists trying to trip up their allies.
Ah. That comes from an article I read way back that introduced me to the concept of singular they being acceptable. In it, the author described an event where she got into an elevator at her multi-floor apartment and was standing by the floor buttons. She politely asked “Everyone got their floors?”—meaning if she needed to press the button for any other floors One person on the elevators corrected them saying that “everyone” was singular, and another that you should in fact say “Does everyone have his or her floor?” since everyone has only one floor. (The article writer was a grammarian and actually delighted by this. But I later read people saying that “their” was entirely appropriate for “everyone,” despite what your English teacher taught you.)
Based on that article, I guess I assumed that asking this sort of thing was common enough that people would realize I was talking about an elevator. It never even occurred to me that it would be confusing.
As for wanting to preserve they for the plural: singular “they” has been in use almost as long as “they” has been a word. It shows up in the Canterbury Tales (though some versions helpfully “fixed” it).
Yes, but the pre-modern usage you cite is pretty much limited to indefinite singular “they”. I.e., when you’re referring to some unspecified individual or succession of individuals who can’t be confidently assigned to any one gender category.
Definite singular “they”, on the other hand, on a par with definite singular “you”, is a very recent innovation in the English language. Chaucer and Shakespeare, for example, never used “they” to refer to an identified individual of known binary gender. Their usage hovered somewhere around stages 2 and 3 of your “singular they progression” described in post #180.
The English language is currently transitioning to stage 4 of that progression, and stage 5 is definitely still embryonic at best. It will be a while before sentences like “Sally generously said the dinner with John would be their treat, but John, not to be outdone in generosity, insisted that they would pay instead, so finally they both agreed to pay their own share” stop sounding odd and confusing to most English speakers.
Sure, but the fact remains that “they” has had its singular uses for centuries, and thus “preserving” the plural meaning is not something that can really happen.
All other singular non-gendered personal pronouns have failed to catch on in meaningful numbers. The only one that people seem to be willing to use en masse is the one that was already in use for indefinite gender. The meaning is just so close to existing uses. Nonbinary people often present as ambiguously gendered. And, since you’re unsure of their gender, you naturally use “they” to refer to them.
I just don’t see it as likely that we wind up with any other word taking the place of they as the non-gendered singular personal pronoun. I would find it more likely that people start adding words to disambiguate the plural meaning, similar to how “you all” became “y’all.”
These natural evolutions work better than trying to introduce new words.
Amen. Language evolves as needed, it’s a form of natural selection as much as the advancement of species. It will work its way out in time and in a way that feels unforced, because it is unforced.
Well, shoot. As a occasionally militant correcter of the “literal can’t be used figuratively” pedants who ignore it’s long history, I’ll have to keep an eye out for this one and make sure I don’t incorrectly correct people. If it was good enough for Chaucer, it’s good enough for me.
Who should I apologize to? Since we’re talking 3rd person pronouns the referent isn’t present, so am I supposed to apologize to the people I am talking to? What’s the point of that? I hope you’re not suggesting I track down the person and send an apology?
It seems bizarre to take it for granted that the referent of a third-person pronoun will never be present in the conversation. That happens all the time. “Hi Jane, Bob here was just telling me that you took his message but I never got it”, etc. And if you use the wrong name or pronoun in a case like that, of course you apologize directly to the person you misidentified.
Otherwise, as in any situation where you refer to somebody incorrectly, a simple acknowledgement of your error does duty for an apology, although throwing in a “sorry” never hurts.
“Actually, Bob goes by ‘Dr. Benson’, not ‘Mr.’.” “Oh sorry, I did know that but forgot.”
“You may not have noticed that Lee uses they/them pronouns? It’s in their profile.” “No, I hadn’t noticed; thanks for pointing that out, I’ll remember that about them next time!”
Do we really need to explain these elementary facts of conversational etiquette to people worried about using the wrong pronouns, or are you Just Asking Questions in order to make modern pronoun usage seem more complicated and intimidating than it needs to be?
The point of apologizing for an error in identification, as most people not brought up in a barn are already aware, is to make it clear that the error was inadvertent and that you know it’s disrespectful to deliberately or carelessly misidentify people. In the current spate of “anti-woke” bad manners where so many people think that deliberately and rudely misidentifying another person is somehow striking some kind of heroic blow for freedom of speech, apologies are especially useful for distinguishing an honest mistake from the “anti-woke” asshole kind.
Thank you for clarifying. I hadn’t thought of your first case - “Bob here said you didn’t get his email” - and I guess I didn’t think of "Sorry, I meant ‘they’ " being an actual apology - that’s more of a verbal acknowledgement of an error.
No prob, sorry I snapped at you, if you’ll forgive my apologizing for rudeness in the Pit! I get that this is a culturally fraught issue that can make conversations somewhat tense in some situations.
But AFAICT there is no need to do anything more elaborate about accidental pronoun misuse than is required for any other form of accidental misidentification.