How about the simpler and terser “a driver of a company vehicle involved in a collision should …”? But, yes, we were taught to recast into the plural as a way of avoiding “he or she.”
I’ve done that, too. But I have a bunch of formal sign-offs, for example, that are specifically about a single person, and I have recast them all to avoid pronouns altogether.
I suffered through this problem in my column. My readership is engineers, and I often refer to generic engineers, so I did not want to use the generic “he.” The plural solution seldom worked, and the reuse of the identifier was stilted. I used he/she often and I also used he for example 1 and she for example 2 - assuming I had 2. “They” becoming acceptable has made my life much easier.
The possibility of non-binary engineers doesn’t really come up, but they dealing with them also is lagniappe.
I know one, fwiw.
Not challenging you, but do you have a cite for formal acceptsnce by grammarians?
One thing about “they” that sounds odd to my “creaky old ears” is how some people decide to use the singular form of the verb when using “they” to refer to one person. An example (which I sadly cannot find at the moment, so I’m just going by memory) is a story I saw on my university’s newspaper website. The author was writing about one student who had chosen “they” as their pronoun. The author then wrote “They is…” That really sounds odd to me!
Well, how about
Yeah, that sounds weird.
Well, they don’t call out the enbies specifically, but those cites make the approach seem pretty official. If I get challenged on it I will cite those (or maybe you!
)
They instead of he or she is common practice in Australian English, not recent or remarkable.
On the new meaning, I was listening to a podcast, I think it was Catfish, where a meeting of people unknown to each other had been set up. One of the unknown parties was referred to as they, and hosts were now confused, was it one person or more?
So IMO it could do with some work.
There was a recent op-ed in the NY Times specifically advocating for using the singular form of the verb when “they” is used to refer to a single person. It is weird, but I could see getting used to it. In a couple of books I’ve read recently, “they” is used to refer to a single NB person, with the plural form, and I found it really confusing.
Here’s that op-ed:
This is, of course, off-topic for this thread, in that this thread is specifically about using “they” in place of him/her when the gender is not known, not for NB people.
Surely we can choose our number as well as our gender?
But, anyway,
how is “they are” (referring to one person) any more confusing than “you are” (addressing one person)? I’m not yet convinced the gender of the person matters in the first case any more than in the second case.
Do you mean because “you” can refer to more than one person? If that’s what you mean, I would say that, most of the time, “you” refers to one person and “they” refers to multiple people. When writers use “you” to refer to many people, it’s usually in the context of someone addressing a bunch of people already, or it’s clarified by writing “all of you” or “you all”.
I mean that in both cases one is using a plural personal pronoun to refer to exactly one person. Indeed, most of the time with “you”, as you point out.
Right, but in English, we don’t usually leave out the pronoun, and “you” typically refers to one person, while “they” typically refers to multiple people. When “you” refers to many people, my experience has been that it is accompanied by other words to make that clear. When “they” is used for someone who is non-binary, it’s not usually made clear.
Actually, those two online dictionaries do contain mentions of non-binary people in their definitions of “they,” but I hadn’t included them, because when I had originally posted those references, it was in response to someone who just did not like the use of “they” to refer to a single person, and was convinced that it was not correct.
Here are the non-binary references:
From Merriam-Webster:
From the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries:
If they can’t agree on any of the other fine options that have been presented (ze, e, zir hir etc) the singular pronouns should be “theysingular” and “themsingular”. If you don’t actually say the “singular” bit you’re talking about more than one person, you’re talking about a generic person or you’re simply wrong.
Honestly, I often DO find that confusing, and I’ve taken to usually specifying “you all” or similar when I’m referring to multiple people with “you”.
I am eagerly looking forward to “them-all” becoming popular.
A lot of this is regional; and I would expect a non-native English speaker to be particularly sensitive to it. For example, in English, “Toni” is generally accepted as a feminine diminutive (roughly the female equivalent of Tony); but in various places in Europe, it’s the masculine diminutive of the local variation on Antonius (Antonii, Antonio, Antal, Anton, etc.).
Similarly, Nino is a Italian masculine diminutive for a variety of names, but it’s also a feminine name (like St. Nino) found in the Caucuses.
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a female “Tony” though. But still, I would think the more language exposure you have, the less confident you would be in your assumptions.
Me too, but it isn’t relevant to the column.