Yup. If, for example, you read any news about nonbinary/agender celebrities such as rapper Angel Haze or Australian activist Nevo Zisin, you’ll see exactly that sort of usage of definite singular “they” referring to a specific individual.
I have no objection to “E,” “em,” and “es,” but I tend to bristle at absolute-sounding statements along the lines of “X doesn’t work in English.” But the more I look at it, the more I like the way “E,” “em,” and “es” look.
I don’t think it’s becoming moot. I mean, I guess it depends how fast “becoming” is. But I interact in a lot of contexts in which the choice of “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” “Ms.,” or something else is necessary.
This is clearly untrue, because I’m a counter-example. I just don’t like singular “they” and I never will.
But I’m happy to accommodate changing notions of gender and new words–I learn new words all the time. I now call myself “cisgender” and a few years ago I would have had no notion of such an idea.
Anyway, it seems to me that “they” has other kinds of baggage, besides just the prescriptivist grammatical one (guilty!). And that has to do with (1) the contentiousness over the use of they, and (2) the claim of “they” in particular as a gender-designator.
I’m in favor of an absolutely new set of pronouns because they don’t have baggage. “E” in my mind isn’t just gender-neutral. It’s non-gendered, or beyond gendered. The purpose is to have a word that no one can choose and no one can reject. Currently, some individuals choose to be “they.”
But in my mind, a great part of the value is that you can’t choose “E.” Nor can you reject “E.” Because “E” is beyond anyone’s personal desires or intent or identity.
I don’t imagine that “he,” “she,” and “they” are going to disappear completely, not right away anyway. So a person can still choose “he,” “she,” or “they” as an identity. But “E” in my intent is beyond identity. Even if you think of yourself as “he,” “she,” or “they,” you can’t deny being an “E.” E is everyone regardless of choice and E is chosen by no one.
Sure I can: I’m not an e.
See? It was easy.
Like most all other language reformers, Acsenray, you’ve got an idea for an arguably great and brilliantly simple system that would probably work admirably except for the fact that almost all the language speakers have essentially zero interest in adopting it. Well, you’re in good company.
So when people use language in an improper way and you do not like it, then that is bad. If they use it in an improper way, but you like it, then that is simply “evolution” of the language.
What is to stop anyone from making the claim? If I call a dog a tree and a tree a cat, can’t I just claim that I am starting the evolutionary process and that it is not wrong?
This is always applied selectively by the left. In the other thread about concentration camps, your side argues that its usage by AOC is legitimate because it matches what the British did 120 years ago. But if I say that “they” is a plural pronoun you simply cite the latest left leaning dictionary to claim I am wrong. You get to hold your own political positions, but not make up your own language.
I probably didn’t write clearly, but “English does not like diacritics” is not expressing an absolute, but an observation. I was pointing to the fact that English routinely elides diacritic marks without making any value judgement about it (being a descriptivist). And the adoption rate of new words is improved by conforming to existing preferences.
I don’t think that’s an apt example. Of course people make up and use new words all the time, like “google” or “automobile”. But these aren’t really fundamental parts of speech. Imagine if, instead of “people who aren’t transgender are cisgender now”, somebody insisted that instead of ‘the’, the definite article in English is going to be ‘squeege’ from now on. It’s a much deeper change to the language.
He, She, It, They, Them, Him and Her are all in the top 100 most frequently spoken English words. Most of these words are the exact same as they were in the time of King Alfred, before the huge Norse influence on the language, let alone the even larger Norman influence, and yet they haven’t changed a bit in 1200 years, except for normal regional dialect variation. I don’t think they’ll be replaced or even supplemented with “fae” and “zir” anytime soon.
Now, now, now. Everybody’s allowed to have their own pet peeves about language evolution, and those pet peeves usually exist in the gray areas where a shift in usage still isn’t fully completed.
For example, almost everybody still agrees that “loose” for “lose” or “lightening” for “lightning” is an error rather than a variant, so we complain about them.
But once a usage shift has actually taken place, continuing to complain about it puts you in irrelevant “Old Man Yells At Clouds” territory. As I noted, I no longer bitch (much) about the use of “based off of” for “based on”, because it’s fairly well established in common usage. Same, even more so, for the use of “who” for “whom” and, increasingly, even “whom” for “who”.
I personally still don’t like these particular changes—I’m allowed to personally not like them—but at this point, if I go around obstreperously complaining about them, I’m just a tiresome grump, not a brave defender of linguistic purity. Once that tipping point is reached, it’s reached: this is part of what the language is now.
Sure, but you’ll be left talking to yourself. While I think linguistic prescriptivism is fun and, up to a point, necessary and healthy, I acknowledge that in the last analysis, language is about what language users actually do, not making up and enforcing rules about what language users ought to do, no matter how enjoyable that may be. Nobody but you calls a dog a tree and a tree a cat, so your attempt to genetically engineer some linguistic evolution in that direction is unlikely ever to get anywhere.
Oh, there, there. Language evolves in all different directions, and whether or not a particular linguistic shift occurs has nothing to do with political affiliation.
If it’s any comfort to you, “libtard” is a recognized dictionary word now, and the erroneous use of “Democrat” rather than “Democratic” as a proper adjective (as in “Democrat Party”) is gradually developing into an accepted variant, even though “the left” doesn’t approve of either of those particular shifts. So you’re not the only one having to put up with linguistic evolution that you don’t happen to like.
They said “drives me nuts,” not “it’s wrong.” One can acknowledge something is “correct” or widely accepted, and still not like it. E.g. I don’t like the fact that “decimate” has come to mean “destroy” but if I were a teacher, I wouldn’t mark that usage as wrong.
Sure you can. And we can’t say it’s wrong, we’ll just observe that nobody else uses the word that way.
Pedantic nitpickery: “he”, “it”, “him”, “her” are all from Old English, but “they”, “them” are from Old Norse. The source of “she” is not certain.
But you are right that changing pronoun usage is difficult.
And just because a handful of millenials use grammar improperly does not mean it is now okay.
I’m not sure what you mean by the second sentence. If I say, “I ain’t got no money” what do you mean by saying that sentence is “legitimate”? If you mean it in the sense that everyone understands what I mean, then I agree, but it is no more proper grammatically than to say that “Alex brought their laptop.” You say that “Alex brought his laptop” or "Alex brought her laptop.’
“They” is plural. Just because there is a concentrated effort to have a genderless society and eliminate all gender distinctions as a matter of political philosophy does not mean that you can decree that the English language has already changed.
nm
not worth it
It’s just a difference in degree, not in kind. It’s not really much of an argument. It’s also specifically what my OP leaves to the side for a discussion about the merits, not feasibility.
There’s a lot of fudging in this sentence. “He” and “him” existed in Old English (although “him” was dative only). “Her” replaced Old English “hire.” “It” replaced “hit.” “They” and “Them” replaced a complex set of gendered pronouns (hie, heo, hio, him). There’s no linguistic rule that words that last X years can never change. Regardless, that doesn’t really say much about the actual question asked in this thread.
What does mean that something is ok? Who or what has the authority to determine that something is not an error or a variant but the One True Language?
And more recently, “thou” / “thee” / “thy” / “ye” / “you” / “your” has been replaced by “you” / “you” / “your” / “you” / “you” / “your”.
When linguistic prescriptivists complain about the dumbing down of our language, I like to point to that change. Because our contemporary second-person pronouns are ambiguous compared to what we had. And yet they continue to use the same confusing muddle of pronouns they learned as children. 
I’m okay referring to people by whatever pronoun they might prefer. I’m a he not a they.
To me it’s an unnecessary hurdle. I prefer to have an option that bypasses the entire question of preference.
I am violently opposed to introducing into the English language any words that you have to decorate (with lines or accent marks or whatever).
And I doubt I could retrain myself to stop using “he” and “she” even if I wanted to, which I don’t.
What I really want is a gender-free alternative to “Sir” or “Ma’am.” A while back I was checking out at the store, and the person ahead of me walked off without one of her bags. I was pretty sure the person was a woman, so I called out “Ma’am! I think you forgot one of your bags!” And it struck me as odd that I had to know a stranger’s gender in order to get their attention in a polite way (i.e. without resorting to something as vulgar as “Hey you!”).
In France, a special authority decides what is French, and what is not. When that decision was made, French was the dominant language in the western hemisphere. Since then it has begun to decline.
English has no central authority. It has increased in usage throughout the world since the time of the Norman Conquest, when French failed to become the language of Britain. The currently antiquated elements of the language will fade, as have so many of them before. More new words, and usages will grow.
Not sure who said it, but the definition of dictionary was said to be: n; a record of a moment in the history of a language. Often mistaken by pedants for a rule book.
I’m personally up for “they” as a generic usage in pretty much any situation, could possibly be persuaded into “it” but I feel like a lot of people would find it depersonalising and insulting so … you go first! Don’t like ‘E’ because it sounds like a bad cockney accent, and I don’t think there’s any chance of me losing that association.
On the whole, yes, gendered pronouns have had their day - now that there is much reduced separation of societal roles by sex, they’ve pretty much outlived their usefulness. Knowing whether someone is a “he” or “she” no longer gives us any practical information about their likely roles or abilities, so keeping them is just adding useless complexity to modern life.
And I’ll point out another instance in which we’re developing a dire need for non-gender-specific usages - online, international. If I get an email from, say, “Jean Jensen” and I know they were born in Australia, I can make a pretty accurate guess that they’re probably female. If I don’t know where they come from … maybe they’re French, and male. If the mail is from “Bei En Yang” I have seriously no hope (I have heard from Chinese speakers that under those circumstances they’d have no hope too - that if you see a Chinese name in real Chinese characters you can pretty much work out gender, but once it’s been transcribed into Latin, you lose all that information). The more interactions you have initially online, the more you are communicating with or about people that you seriously don’t know the sex (or gender) of. We need genderless pronouns for that situation … might as well just go on and use them all the time.