# What's the big deal with "their" ? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 24, 2004, 9:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858 "2004-02-24T09:00:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Zoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a4c791/32.png) [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 3:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/21 "2004-02-25T03:10:59Z")
I don’t think I ever say “he or she” anymore. I always try to remember to write “she or he” just to try to balance things out after all of the years of reading it the other way. I invite all of you to join me in my mini-crusade. 🆒 ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/22 "2004-02-25T03:28:45Z")
> [@Exapno Mapcase](#): > > Exactly. The more usages you investigate the more instances you find in which using “he” “him” or “his” as inclusive creates false impressions in peoples’ minds. (e.g., The gynocologist will examine his patient in the third room.) > > It was accepted as “correct” when the culture was so overwhelmingly male-dominated that the few female exceptions were culturally meaningless. That era has long gone. Continuing the usage today is simply an insult. I wish I knew who conducted the experiment, but in my Morals in Education class, my professor taught a unit about pronouns and inclusively, and told us about an experiment done using only male participants. The thrust of the experiment was to give them samples of writing (something about business law, I think) that used just female pronouns to read. After they’d read it, they were asked if they thought the samples meant men too. 70% said no. So much for people not being influenced by the gender of the pronouns… ---
**Author:** ![g8rguy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/7cd45c/32.png) [@g8rguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/g8rguy)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/23 "2004-02-25T03:46:32Z")
> [@elfkin477](#): > > The thrust of the experiment was to give them samples of writing (something about business law, I think) that used just female pronouns to read. After they’d read it, they were asked if they thought the samples meant men too. 70% said no. So much for people not being influenced by the gender of the pronouns… But of course the male pronoun has something of a tradition of being understood as a reference either to men or to men and women alike, while the female pronoun does not. Is it really fair to expect people to understand that a word is meant to be inclusive when it doesn’t have a history of being such? I guess I’m missing your point. A non-standard usage was misunderstood by a large number of people, and from this we conclude… ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/24 "2004-02-25T04:02:11Z")
English has enough oddball inconsistancies and screwed-up conjugations and whatnot that using “they” for “third person singular” doesn’t strike me as particularly sinful. But can anyone tell me why the Toronto NHL franchise isn’t the “Maple _Leaves_”? ---
**Author:** ![Dahnlor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dahnlor/32/533_2.png) [@Dahnlor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dahnlor)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/25 "2004-02-25T04:08:01Z")
English has a perfectly valid gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun: **it**. As in, “make sure your child brings **its** own lunch.” “It” eliminates the grammatical problems with “them,” avoids the awkwardness of “he or she”, and is equally offensive to anyone regardless of gender. D ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/26 "2004-02-25T04:09:16Z")
**Kizarvexius** : > [@](#): > > I’ve always wondered why people get in such a twist over using a default gender in the case of an unknown. It was so much simpler to say “each child shall bring his own lunch” than to raise charges of sexism and exclusionary language and therefore make every written document a potential minefield. > > Other languages don’t seem to have a problem with this. In Spanish, if you are referring to a group of people, it is only given a feminine gender if every member of the group is female. A single male member of the group renders the entire group as masculine. I could easily be wrong, but I don’t hear a lot of complaints about this. Sounds reasonable to me. Let’s do ours the other way around, though, just for the heck of it. Everyone will use the female gender in her speech to refer to the unknown singular. Womankind is better off without all this petty squabbling. ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/27 "2004-02-25T04:13:49Z")
> [@](#): > > _Bryan Ekers wrote:_ > But can anyone tell me why the Toronto NHL franchise isn’t the “Maple Leaves”? I can! When a standard word, with an irregular way to make plurals, past tenses, etc., is co-opted for another meaning, the usual treatment is to derive the different forms of the word using regular rules. Another sports example is to “fly out.” Fly is a verb with an irregular past tense, “flew,” but when we take the word for a new context, we forget all that irregular stuff and treat it as a new word, and make its past tense behave normally: “flied out.” ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 4:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/28 "2004-02-25T04:15:25Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > **Kizarvexius** : > > Sounds reasonable to me. Let’s do ours the other way around, though, just for the heck of it. Everyone will use the female gender in her speech to refer to the unknown singular. Womankind is better off without all this petty squabbling. Yeah, but if Armstrong and Aldrin had gone to the moon “For All Womankind”, it would have taken them ten times as long to pack! Besides, they’d have kept asking “does this spacesuit make me look fat?” ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/29 "2004-02-25T04:18:47Z")
> [@g8rguy](#): > > But of course the male pronoun has something of a tradition of being understood as a reference either to men or to men and women alike, while the female pronoun does not. Is it really fair to expect people to understand that a word is meant to be inclusive when it doesn’t have a history of being such? > > I guess I’m missing your point. A non-standard usage was misunderstood by a large number of people, and from this we conclude… d’oh! I suppose it’d make more sense if I mentioned the rest of the experiment, huh? They read these samples _after_ all agreeing that He/Him/His/Mankind in documents was inclusive of women. Better? ---
**Author:** ![g8rguy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/7cd45c/32.png) [@g8rguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/g8rguy)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 5:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/30 "2004-02-25T05:11:28Z")
> [@elfkin477](#): > > d’oh! I suppose it’d make more sense if I mentioned the rest of the experiment, huh? They read these samples _after_ all agreeing that He/Him/His/Mankind in documents was inclusive of women. Better? A little, but I guess I was sort of assuming that, even though He/Him/His/Mankind don’t look like they should be inclusive of women, some of us have grown up with the understanding that they’re supposed to be read that way anyway. In contrast, She/Her/Hers/Womankind aren’t generally understood to be inclusive of men. Of course, as I think about it, that’s probably what the experiment was trying to demonstrate to begin with, eh? Don’t mind me… ---
**Author:** ![MartinL](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ebca7d/32.png) [@MartinL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MartinL)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 12:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/31 "2004-02-25T12:45:17Z")
From a different viewpoint, there are nouns (like woman) and pronouns (she, her, hers) that refer solely to females, but there is no easy way to make clear that you are referring solely to males. It could always be understood as a reference to human beings in general. Isn’t that an indication for discrimination against males? 😕 ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/32 "2004-02-25T16:13:14Z")
> [@](#): > > _elfkin477 wrote:_ > d’oh! I suppose it’d make more sense if I mentioned the rest of the experiment, huh? They read these samples after all agreeing that He/Him/His/Mankind in documents was inclusive of women. Better? Not at all. The way I learned to speak, there are three third person singular possessive pronouns: one when the person is female, one when it’s male, and the other when it’s not determined. Those pronouns are “her,” “his,” and “his,” respectively. It just so happens that we don’t have a separate word for the indeterminate case, and “his” serves double duty. Now in your experiment, the subjects first all agreed on the rule that’s in common use. Then they were given a sample text, and most interpreted it according to the common usage, namely that when “her” was used, the person it refers to is definitely female. So what did this experiment prove exactly? ---
**Author:** ![JRR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ecccb3/32.png) [@JRR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRR)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/33 "2004-02-25T17:05:18Z")
> [@elfkin477](#): > > d’oh! I suppose it’d make more sense if I mentioned the rest of the experiment, huh? They read these samples _after_ all agreeing that He/Him/His/Mankind in documents was inclusive of women. Better? Er, no. The only thing this proved was that, having grown up reading “he” as an all-inclusive pronoun, the use of “she” came across as awkward. Now, if you were to do the same experiment with females and get the exact opposite result (“she” inclusive, “he” not) you might have a point. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/34 "2004-02-25T17:24:40Z")
Another proposal I’ve seen is to use the speaker’s own gender, when gender is indeterminate. Or rather, I’ve never seen this proposed, but I have seen novels written using this convention, and once you get used to it, it seems quite natural. **Dahnlor** , “it” is indeed the proper English pronoun for third person neuter, but that’s not what we’re looking for. “It” is properly used for something which does not have gender, not for something of whose gender we are merely unsure. What we’re looking for is a third person indeterminate. ---
**Author:** ![Jodocus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f04885/32.png) [@Jodocus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jodocus)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/35 "2004-02-25T22:31:03Z")
> [@Kizarvexius](#): > > I’ve always wondered why people get in such a twist over using a default gender in the case of an unknown. It was so much simpler to say “each child shall bring his own lunch” than to raise charges of sexism and exclusionary language and therefore make every written document a potential minefield. > > Other languages don’t seem to have a problem with this. In Spanish, if you are referring to a group of people, it is only given a feminine gender if _every_ member of the group is female. A single male member of the group renders the entire group as masculine. I could easily be wrong, but I don’t hear a lot of complaints about this. > > I just don’t see the big deal. Maybe it’s because I’m a guy… 😕 I saw another flyer from school. The spanish part had “chico/chica” for child about ten times. So political correctness is seeping into spanish too! ---
**Author:** ![Jodocus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f04885/32.png) [@Jodocus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jodocus)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/36 "2004-02-25T22:34:17Z")
> [@MartinL](#): > > From a different viewpoint, there are nouns (like woman) and pronouns (she, her, hers) that refer solely to females, but there is no easy way to make clear that you are referring solely to males. It could always be understood as a reference to human beings in general. > Isn’t that an indication for discrimination against males? 😕 Hey, wait a minute! Woman get their own exclusive pronouns! That’s not fair! Where can I sue? 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Jodocus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f04885/32.png) [@Jodocus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jodocus)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/37 "2004-02-25T22:38:39Z")
> [@Shade](#): > > I’ve found the convention picked up from a Nomic player of “e, er, erself” to be relatively easy to read. I doubt it’ll catch on, but when e uses it it’s fairly easy to understand er, as the sound is near enough to an existing word to be covered by the ‘typo’ part of your brain 🙂 > > That was only used for hypothetical people, or people of indeterminate gender - I see the advantages of having completely gender-neutral language, but I really doubt it’ll happen. OTOH, when discussing several people, maybe they should be assigned pronouns in some arbitrary way, maybe “Bee, Cee, Dee” in order of appearance (except not that stupid 🙂 ) so you can tell them apart… er sounds too much like “her” for my taste! ---
**Author:** ![redtail23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/3e96dc/32.png) [@redtail23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/redtail23)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/38 "2004-02-25T23:44:09Z")
I’ve long been a proponent of a set of gender-neutral pronouns for English. When the Web came along, I hoped for a bit that it might actually happen, but alas, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Here’s an interesting site promoting GNPs: [GNP FAQ](http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/). The problem seems to be that no one can think of a pronoun set that people like. E/eir, zie/zir, hir/hir are the ones I’ve seen most. However, my family and I came up with a new set the other night, so y’all are privy to its internet debut. It’s a bit USA-centric, but I think we can overcome that with a little effort. he, she, it, _pat_ him, her, it, _pat_ his,hers,its,_pats_ himself, herself, itself, _patself_ 😃 Whatdya think? ---
**Author:** ![ataraxy22](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ataraxy22/32/307_2.png) [@ataraxy22](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ataraxy22)\ **Post date:** [February 26, 2004, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/39 "2004-02-26T02:58:18Z")
> [@acsenray](#): > > Sorry, **moriah** , but to me, both of those options means 30 kids squabbling over one peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. They can’t take peanut butter to school anymore due to increasingly high rates of severe peanut allergies. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2018, 8:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858/41 "2018-05-21T08:18:28Z")
> [@CurtC](#): > > Kizarvexius, I don’t get it either. To me, the use of the generic “his” sounds perfectly fine and inclusive. The problem is that in the past that usage has been used to exclude women, even if it’s supposed to be inclusive. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-big-deal-with-their/230858.md?page=3)