When i was a child, i was taught that the grammatically correct way to say that was
Hey look, I just found somebody’s wallet on the ground. I wonder whose it is. I bet he is looking for it. I’d like to return it to him.
Because “the male embraces the female”, and because “somebody” is singular and must be matched to singular pronouns and verbs.
That use of the singular they was common in Shakespeare’s time, but had been wiped out by (male) grammarians who liked to impose “logical” rules. As i mentioned above, rules change over time, and this one has gone in both directions. But i bet i could find grammar books from my childhood and young adulthood that stress the importance of that.
And i used to do it. And that helped my SAT score. I used “he”, or recast the sentence to be plural or to avoid pronouns. I had to be taught that, because that use of the singular “they” was never completely wiped out of common parlance. But it was officially incorrect.
Sure, but the novel part isn’t using “they” to refer to a single person.
The novel part is recognizing that you may not know the gender of a particular single person, even though you know that person’s name or have seen their appearance (or, that some people feel that being ambiguous is their natural state).
This could have also happened in Shakespeare’s day, and the example you gave wouldn’t have been confusing in terms of how many people were being referenced (the controversy, such as it would have been, would have been over transgenderism, not the use of the words).
Also, Google leads me to this Shakespeare line (from Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3)
He uses “their” after using “man”. We know the sex of the person he’s referring to, but he still uses the singular they (well, in this case, their), instead of his.
Implicit biases are hardwired into the way our brains work. It’s really great for a reader (or for any person) to be aware of their implicit biases, but it honestly sounds like your friend was very much hoping to have that conversation with somebody so that she could have her “oh, I guess you just made an assumption” moment.
Representation is important. One of the reasons the first Black Panther movie was so exciting for a lot of black kids was because they’d never gotten to see a big budget superhero movie full of people who looked like them.
Withholding race like your friend did robs the black reader of that kind of representation, and robs the white reader of a chance to read a book that challenges their implicit biases. There are narrative reasons to not give the reader important information, but “ho ho ho aren’t you the biased fellow?” isn’t one of them. Of course you’re biased. So am I. We all are.
It’s Shakespeare. Shakespeare bends many rules of language in order to get melodic flow. Even so, in this case he’s not referring to a man, he’s referring to many generic men so is well within standard use of singular they.
Substituting their for his in that sentence doesn’t change the melodic flow one bit.
Thank you for confirming that the use of the singular they has been in existence since at least Shakespeare’s time (although I could go back further and quote the Bible).
I agree with your closing example as a long-standing use of singular they to refer to a completely unknown person.
What is novel and is still unexpected or actively annoying to many people now in 2023 is to use singular they to denote a known person.
I was talking to Robert yesterday and they said “blah blah blah.”
I’m all for moving forward with singular “they” as a gender-nonspecific term for known individuals of known gender. Would’ve been better if a new coinage had caught on, but that ship has long-since sailed.
But ISTM it’s obtuse to think those two uses of singular they are equivalent or equally long-standing.
I get the distinction, but not how it is in any way annoying or jarring.
If I don’t know Pat’s gender, I might say that they are running down the street, because I don’t know if I should put them in category Male or Female.
If I know that Pat identifies as non-binary, then I know not to place them in the category of Male or Female. So again, they are running down the street.
The only way I could possibly imagine being bothered by this is if the idea of someone being nonbinary bothered me. And that’s bigotry (even if we are unconscious about that being the cause of our discomfort because we didn’t bother to think about it for very long).
I don’t think that’s fair. They didn’t link their paper, and the only other information we have about it is that they “did well,” suggesting they got high marks from it.
Your statement is oversimplified. Yes, you can find use of singular they in older works. But, around a century or two ago, it fell out of fashion in formal and later standard English. Writers were taught to use “he” as a generic pronoun. In the mid-20th century, this changed to “he or she.” Singular they has only regained wide acceptance again in standard English in the current century.
I know that I was taught “he or she” as recently as my high school in the early 2000s. And that fit with my experience. Singular they was only used in informal speech or written dialog.
I think an interesting time capsule is the NIV translation team. In 2002, they set out to create a version of the Bible with updated language, based on actual statistics. And one major thing they decided was that the generic masculine no longer existed in standard English. However, they did not use singular they, but would recast sentences to use the plural, or replace pronouns with nouns. The same team later created the NIV 2011. And, at that point, they said the statistics showed that singular they was the most common way to render gender neutral pronouns. That suggests that widespread acceptance of singular occurred some time between those two dates.
And that is all about singular indefinite they. As others have said, singular definitethey is even newer. And it is the kind that gets the most objections today.
I thought this was about otherwise good or innocuous posters who go bad in one particular thread and need to be called to account–not as trolls, but in the pit all the same?
Exactly. The sound of the word “they” is not grating. It can’t be - we use “they” constantly. What some find “grating” is the reminder that not everyone fits the comforting gender binary the listener grew up with.
Gosh, maybe somebody should open a fourth type of pit thread for “pittings that aren’t important enough to spawn their own threads and also don’t belong in the trolls omnibus thread and also don’t belong in the thread created for pittings that don’t fit either of those categories but we still would like to talk about them.”
Yeah. I had the same thought. Then 10 more posts appeared while I was writing this one …
Maybe best to retire this whole discussion to a different thread. Which may not be a Pit thread at all since we’re all being so polite and non-personal about it.
I agree with you that I personally don’t find it annoying.
There are spots where, particularly in convoluted sentences involving both singular known people, and singular unknown people, and groups, it can be hard to parse who the referent is. And that, to me, is jarring. Occasionally. Which IMO signals a need to restructure that particular sentence, not a need to quit using “they” in those general circumstances.
I’ll point out that you chose an example that was gender ambiguous while I chose one that was not gender ambiguous. That’s a significant difference in set-up that produces IMO a legitimate difference in outcome. And yes here in 2023 in the absence of specific gender info it’s more polite to assume ambiguous than unambiguous.
The only way I could possibly imagine being bothered by this …
That seems a bit over the top to me. Only & possibly are pretty rarified territory. You do you of course.
We could also quibble about “bothered”. Yes, there are folks, such as the person who launched this massive digression who are incensed by the very idea of the existence of non-binary or brain doesn’t match assigned-at-birth gender. Screw them (the incensed ones that is).
But there are lots of ways, including rigid thinkers who imbibed their 4th grade English teacher’s many dictums as Inerrant Gospel, for folks to be bothered without being active (or even subconscious) bigots.
Labeling any discomfort / confusion whatsoever as purely the result of bigotry is itself zealotry.
Reading Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga was one of the best experiences of my life, and Aral Vorkosigan may be the only character I’ve ever encountered that I straight-up want to marry. My son is named after the series protagonist.
I just received The Curse of Chalion as a Christmas gift, thus I will soon venture into her fantasy stuff.
It’s worth noting that Bujold also writes about rape, and even a sympathetic rapist, but there is nothing she ever puts in one of her books that doesn’t later turn out to have a significant storytelling purpose. It’s one of the reasons I’m in awe of her.
Gah. Friday was one of his late works, and I dislike the late Heinlein. Try one of what’s called the juveniles; they’re fun adventure stories (with some serious undercurrents) without a lot of the crap in the later work.
