I go with Damon Knight’s “yeye.”
But, ultimately, it won’t work. Pronouns have been unchanged for hundreds of years, and they aren’t going to change now.
[QUOTE=Gangster Octopus]
I really don’t like using they, because I am irrational and a crumudgeon.
[/QUOTE]
But you sort of already did:
[QUOTE=Miss Woodhouse]
They has been coming in as the gender neutral singular for years now.
[/QUOTE]
If by “for years” you actually mean, “for the past couple centuries,” then you are correct.
I use “they” casually, however my fear of my grammar-nazi mom makes me think twice about ever using it anywhere she will read it. She calls me out on it. And I’ll be 36 next week.
[QUOTE=Leaffan]
Well “they” doesn’t work. Ever. At all.
My kids periodically get papers from the school that go something like this: “Make sure your child returns the approval form or they won’t be able to go on the field trip.”
Well, that’s patently ridiculous: child, they? Come on.
[/QUOTE]
I cannot tell if you are joking. Are you?
[QUOTE=Giles]
Half of us don’t have the right body parts for that.
[/QUOTE]
All of us have the right body parts for a gender neutral pronoun.
[QUOTE=Diomedes]
All of us have the right body parts for a gender neutral pronoun.
[/QUOTE]
Right, but some of us are not a “he” and others are not a “she”.
I don’t think injecting an artificial term into the language is going to work - no matter how well thought out, or technically brilliant it is. It just doesn’t work like that.
And it’s no use complaining that another existing term (such as ‘they’) is wrong because it also means something else. The whole damn language is crammed with similar ambiguity, and that’s not going away either.
[QUOTE=Diomedes]
What’s wrong with using ‘he’ for both masculine and gender neutral pronouns, again?
[/QUOTE]
“He,” “him,” and “man” have always struck me as ambiguously gendered words, depending on context. It catches me off guard when I hear someone describing a hypothetical scenario in which the gender is irrelevant, and they opt to use “she.” For example, “When a customer comes in, will she see the sign?” My instinct is to answer “We only have female customers?” However, if the individual had said, “will he see the sign,” it would strike me as the gender-neutral version of “he.” When we talk about “early man,” I suspect there were women among them. Maleness itself is kind of the genderless gender for this reason.
Some folks undergo a change in gender during the course of their lifetime. A genderless pronoun would make this less awkward for everyone involved.
I agree with Ganster Octopus. I think te has a good point. (Does that work?)
[QUOTE=Charger]
Maleness itself is kind of the genderless gender for this reason.
[/QUOTE]
Certainly this has been abundantly the case in history, at least in the English language. However, that’s precisely what some people object to - on the grounds that it reinforces the male-dominated notion of society etc.
I’m not sure there is a solution, to be honest. Male pronouns used to be acceptable as gender neutral too, it’s just that a bunch of people decided that wasn’t acceptable any more, but don’t seem to have come up with a viable and easily acceptable alternative.
We have gender-neutral terms for other things that happen to coincide with one of the specific-gender terms, and it isn’t a problem. (It’s OK that your dog is a dog, even though she may in fact be a bitch).
[QUOTE=I Love Me, Vol. I]
We also, in this darling English language of ours, need separate pronouns for second-person.
[/QUOTE]
If I remember correctly, “thou” is singular and “you” is plural. But “thou” was dropped, so now we’re stuck with ambiguity.
Ah, wikipedia knows all.
While we’re at it, why don’t we have separate terms for we.
We, meaning a group of people including the speaker, but not the audience.
We, meaning all persons present at the time.
This too would prevent occasional embarrassment and misunderstanding.
[QUOTE=Mangetout]
While we’re at it, why don’t we have separate terms for we.
We, meaning a group of people including the speaker, but not the audience.
We, meaning all persons present at the time.
This too would prevent occasional embarrassment and misunderstanding.
[/QUOTE]
Some languages make this distinction, but English doesn’t. In addition, “we” can be used to denote the generic universal person, particularly when addressing young children: “We don’t hit other people just because we don’t like them, do we?” – that’s also one of the senses of “you” in English.
I guess languages either lose or never have distinctions that aren’t important socially. The distinction between “he” and “she” is the only significant remnant left of grammatical gender in English, and because nouns no longer have grammatical gender in English, “he” and “she” are just used for social gender, i.e., “he” for male people and “she” for female people. The use of “he” for a person of unknown gender no longer works, because it conflicts with ideas of social-gender equality, so we (the generic “we”) have to find something else. “They” is the best fit that we can find – singular versus plural is important in English grammar, but many common words have the same form for both (e.g., “you”, “deer”, “sheep”), so it’s not crucial for understanding meaning.
[QUOTE=Chefguy]
“It puts the lotion on its skin…”
[/QUOTE]
That made me giggle like a girl. Very unbecoming.
[QUOTE=Giles]
Right, but some of us are not a “he” and others are not a “she”.
[/QUOTE]
What Charger said… the masculine form of the prnoun worked fine for years to describe someone whose gender is indeterminate, or irrelevant. Until a reasonable alternative crops up, ‘he’ gets the point across just fine, without the awkwardness of ‘they’ or ‘he or she’. And ‘she’ implies a gender much more strongly than ‘he’ does, just because it (she, that is) doesn’t have the history of being used as a gender-neutral pronoun.