“I went to the restaurant with a friend AND they paid.” That’s what I get for changing my example on the fly.
Sailboat
Not even deliberate concealment: in the absence of a gender-neutral pronoun in English {apart from clumsy circumlocutions like “he or she”, or written-only formulas like s/he} “they” seems to be de facto evolving into a gender-neutral pronoun. “If anyone finds my wallet, could they return it to blah blah blah” sounds and reads a lot better than “…could he or she return it to…” No doubt someone’s done a study on it, but we seem to be in the process of a linguistic change here.
Except that (and this is something I’ve noticed in a lot of complaints about the passive voice) your example isn’t actually in the passive voice.
I think there’s several reasons. It’s common in scientific or academic writings, which gives it a bit of a high-falutin tone and thus (given our modern stylistic preference for very clear writing) tends to make the writing seem mushy, even if it’s not inherently any harder to understand (which it really isn’t; the passive voice is commonly used in speech. It’s not hard to parse for any literate native speaker of English.) And it definitely is used in weasely ways - "It is commonly understood that . . . " and suchlike are methods to avoid actually justifying your viewpoint. Further, it changes the aspect of the verb so that the exact point in time that the action occurred is not indicated, which tends to sap a bit of the vitality from sentences written in the passive.
It’s a good idea not to overuse the passive voice, but it’s silly to eliminate it entirely from speech. It’s worse to draw conclusions about the intent of writers who use it, as in this case discussed in Language Log in which conclusions about Reuters’ supposed bias were drawn from examples of passive voice usage - examples in which, as it turns out, the passive voice was not used. It seems that many people mistake the phrase “passive voice” for sentences that merely don’t state the agent of a verb, even if they’re not actually passives.
And my point has already been made - one of your examples wasn’t a passive. It wasn’t a passive at all - it’s not valid to make up another meaning for the term; the “conventional . . . grammar sense” is the only sense of the term “passive voice”.
“They” doesn’t only refer to plurals; it’s been in use for hundreds of years to indicate that gender is unclear or irrelevant, as with “Each one took their turn.” The use of “they” to avoid having to choose between “he” and “she” is universal and definitely a part of English grammar. The use of it to describe a friend, whose gender is presumably not unclear, is a bit unusual. But the use of “they” as a gender-neutral singular is not unusual in the least.
A common misconception (sometimes called the “illusion of recentness” among linguists.) Actually, “they” is not evolving in that direction. It’s had that sense for a very long time; it evolved to take that role long before either of us was born.
So modify the thrust of my original post from “Yeah, I hate that <followed by examples>” to “Yeah, I hate that and some writing sins of a similar ilk <followed by examle>”.
Speaking as a former ESL teacher, I’ll just note that it’s taken textbooks an awfully long time to catch up - nary a mention in any text that I’ve taught from, yet an everyday usage which would confuse the hell out of students: why do you say “My house was burgled - they took everything.”? Were there several burglars? Why do you say “they” for one person?
That opens the whole can of worms labeled “Prescriptive vs. Descriptive”: to what extent do you teach English as it’s spoken as opposed to English as it “ought” to be? A subject for another hijack, I guess, but I’ll take a shot and say that I’m a prescriptivist with reservations: yeah, these are the rules, go learn 'em. OK, now you’ve learnt 'em you should know that they’re not chiselled in stone and are broken all the time. Here’s how to break 'em properly…
I don’t really understand the occasional prescriptivist who still gets upset by this perfectly normal usage. It’s not like “‘They’ shall only be used as a plural” is written in stone somewhere; deciding that only one use of a word is legitimate makes no sense, especially once you study the range of languages and how they work at transmitting information.
I’m not surprised that ESL textbooks don’t cover this, but I think it’s a bad thing, since it’s a usage that anyone in the English speaking world is going to hear, and frequently. Students should at least be prepared to understand it, even if they decide to speak in a strictly prescriptionist-approved way.
This thread taught me more about passive voice than my entire 12th grade English year. Thanks!
Wow, thanks for all the informative replies, everyone. I appreciate it.
It depends. You could legitimately use passive voice as a stylistic device to deliberately shift the emphasis to the end of the sentence, for example in order to build suspense:
He cleared his throat, and the drawing room fell silent. “Ladies and gentlemen”, he drawled languidly, “I regret to inform you that the murder was committed by…one of our number!”
Excellent example! There’s plenty of good reasons to use the passive voice; it can be overused, but the grammar checkers that highlight every single example are very poorly-designed.
Excellent example! There’s plenty of good reasons to use the passive voice; it can be overused, but the grammar checkers that highlight every single example are very poorly-designed.
I was always taught (and I agree) that the biggest problem with the passive voice is purely stylistic. It’s (yawn) boring. It sounds passive. And usually unnecessarily so. Converting sentences from the passive to the active punches them up and makes the reader think about the action and the actors performing them.
compare:
“Jack was punched by Joe” to “Joe punched Jack”
“i was thrilled by the news” to “the news thrilled me”
It’s not quite as obvious in a single sentence, but an entire paragraph in the passive will put you to sleep compared to an entire paragraph in the active.
The “passive exonerative” is another problem, of course. But IMHO it’s totally legitimate as a rhetorical strategy in a variety of situations. It’s not inherently “wrong.”
I’m not, because I’ve been taking Spanish (as a second language) classes for a while, and when I started dating my current girlfriend and hanging out with her friends and family–native speakers all–I found out that classroom Spanish is quite a bit different from Jamacha Road Spanish. There are a few exceptions within the class, of course–Spanish classes here are highly geared towards the language as used in Latin America, so ‘vosotros’ is entirely absent, ll sounds the same as y and s sounds the same as z, etc. Also, my textbook lists a few colloquial alternatives sometimes when the “correct” word isn’t used much. But it’s definitely prescriptivist.
And honestly? I’m glad it is, for a few reasons:
[ul][li]Speaking a language “by the book” will get you understood by just about every native speaker, everywhere, even if you might sound a little archaic. Plus, there’s no way that all the dialects, even in a three-country radius, of a language as prominent as English or Spanish can be taught effectively to anyone other than people who major in the stuff. I, BTW, have never heard (with my ears) the word “burgled” in my life.[/li][li]The classroom is a stiff, rigid environment made for teaching stiff, rigid things. Is it necessary to spice things up a little to keep students’ attention? Yes, I think so. But the textbook-lecturer-homework triangle is nowhere near as effective for that as just jumping in and listening to native speakers talk.[/li][li]It’s fun to learn how to talk like a native speaker, or at least I have fun doing it. Having that taken away by learning it on notecards that I have to turn in to The Man every three weeks in a neat pile would ruin it, IMO. It’s kind of silly, but it gives me a neat little kick to pronounce “yo” as “zho” in class like my girlfriend would, and watch everyone but the teacher look at me like an alien. It’s a lot more rewarding to use those words and pronunciations in conversation after learning them naturally, too.[/li][li]When the textbook tries to offer up little morsels of slang, it generally fails and the teacher ends up saying “ignore that little sidebar there, nobody uses those words”. If there’s a colloquial word we really need to learn in class, the teacher will tell us during the lesson, or someone will raise their hand and ask.[/ul][/li]
Anyway, language is a naturally flowing and changing thing, and I think its natural evolution is beautiful when observed in its natural environment. Taking it into the classroom makes it lose some of its meaning for me. For me, it’s like the difference between sharing a doobie with Keith Richards while he rocks out on his guitar, and taking a Rock History class where you read a chapter on the Stones.
What fetus said, and its converse:
My former Spanish prof is from Uruguay. She speaks fluent English, but her Spanish is South American, not Mexican or Spanish. She’s had students tell her she’s wrong in some of her Spanish usage because she doesn’t speak like the book.
There is a similar phenomenon in English classrooms when the perfect grammar in the textbook doesn’t match the colloquial/informal grammar used in everyday life.
Robin
Yeah, but they do talk weird down there! 
Anyway, what happens when a Southerner moves to San Francisco and tries to teach Northern California English in a thick Alabama drawl? I see a recipe for disaster, and I also see automatic teacher pigeon-holing.