They aren’t just for addressing people, though. They’re also used to refer to people, and in formal contexts, these honorifics are alive and well. In spoken English on TV news, for example, use of “Mr.” (to refer to a person) did seem to drop somewhat in the early 90s, but has remained about the same since then. In magazines, the same.
Yeah, I have a hard enough time reaching the “at” sign now with this new email thing everyone is doing.
What makes your desire to use whatever pronouns you feel like–and to hell with the preference of the person being addressed or spoken of–different from the desire of right-wing types to use whatever pronouns they feel like (especially when they’re talking about Caitlyn Jenner or Chelsea Manning)?
That may be true for a lot of areas of modern life, but there’s this thing we used to call “the birds and the bees” that makes this statement just a little dubious as a sweeping and absolute generalization. The large majority of people do still have a preference, in at least that one (very important) area of human life. That includes the minority who have a preference for people of the same sex as themselves, of course.
To be clear, Acsenray is basically suggesting a pronoun version of ‘human’.
Man = He
Woman = She
Human = E
Yours and Darren’s complaint is the equivalent of saying “I’m not a human, I’m a man!” which is less than coherent.
A pedantic point that strikes to the core of the issue: we’re not talking about official grammar rules here because there are no such things in American English. There is no officiating body. There are only folks with opinions.
A double negative is not always “improper.” I would never, never correct someone who uses a double-negative to emphasize a point.
No they don’t. They type “loose” when they mean “lose.” This is an orthographic error, not a grammatrical variation. And orthography is much more constrained by constructed rules than spoken language is.
Note that if a given accent pronounced the “s” in “loose” as /z/, your description would be accurate: people would say /looz/ when other people would say /loos/ (I’m terrible with phonetic spelling, please bear with me, folks who are good at it). But that wouldn’t be an error, any more than it’s an error when my Southern-born wife pronounces “oil” as if it rhymes with “bowl”. It’s an accent variant.
But that’s not how orthography works. Spelling is much less flexible.
As for the OP? I wouldn’t mind that change, but I don’t see it as either likely or practical. The solution to the problem of gendered pronouns is that people who have rare pronoun requests make them known, and are gentle with folks who make errors; and people who find out about these requests try to honor them, and are apologetic when they make errors.
It’s part of the “we’re just a bunch of sacks of protoplasm trying to muddle through the day, so for fuck’s sake be good to each other” philosophy.
[luz] [lus]
To me it’s not a question of error. It’s that often gender is not relevant. What if the person is unknown? What if the person can’t be asked? What if it’s a hypothetical person? What if it’s a person whose gender preference can never be known for certain (the poet Homer? The author of a book of the Bible?)
What if it’s any of you on this message board? I don’t know any of you. I don’t know for sure what anyone’s gender is. If you tell me, I’m unlikely to remember for sure just because of the nature of online communication and it doesn’t matter for purposes of our having conversations in text form.
All that really matters is that there exists a person—known or unknown, named or unnamed—to whom I want to refer and whose gender is irrelevant in the context of the conversation.
I can say “person” or “human.” Those words precede gender. “I” has no gender. “You” has no gender. It makes sense to have a third person pronoun that precedes gender.
When or if we become a culture intermixed with aliens, AIs, and uplifted animals we will need a pronoun to indicate that the person you are talking to or about is human. Until then, it is stating the bloody fucking obvious.
I typed that at first and then changed it, because my third-grade-phonics-teacher-self couldn’t help but see those as CVC closed syllables and therefore defaulting to a short vowel sound :).
“They” and “them” seem to me to fill this need nicely. When a person’s gender identity is known, however, my muddling-through-being-a-sack-of-protoplasm rule is to try to respect what the other sack asks, if it’s not a big deal to do so.
They don’t to me. Especially because their singular status has become n identity in itself. There needs to be a pronoun that’s free of identity at all.
There is one new pronoun that already gained some traction in certain circles–“somepony.” If somepony doesn’t want to assume gender in language, then somebody can modify somepony’s vocabulary with that.
Why does there need to be a pronoun that’s free of identity?
Look: the gender-neutral singular “they” has been around for centuries. When some folk want to adopt it as the only singular pronoun they use, that’s great. But you’re suggesting that their adoption of this pronoun somehow means it’s no longer adequate for its centuries-old usage.
That’s not how language changes.
I still don’t understand what you mean by “identity” here. If you mean the singular “they” is currently only associated with people who specifically identify as gender-neutral, well, I don’t see any evidence of that.
Yeah but - it seems like a bit of overkill to have an entire compartmentalisation of the language so as to make the task of indicating ‘people I might be a romantic partner with’ slightly clearer. Especially since the amount of one’s life one spends in choosing a romantic partner out of all the <appropriate gender> people in the world is far less than the amount spent being with that person as a person, not as a representative of their gender.
Not to mention that, although all the people I might possibly get it on with are male, those male people are VASTLY outnumbered by the male people I would never even consider getting it on with. So the pronoun “he” doesn’t really provide a useful guide to whether I’d consider that person a romantic prospect. 99% of the time the answer’s “no”, whatever pronoun a person has.
I don’t think I’m altogether unusual in that
Well English already dropped many gender and grammatical rules that several other Germanic languages have retained (to various degrees) for various reasons.
But languages are always changing. Centuries from now when we’re all gone who knows what the English language will look like. I personally don’t see why we should get rid of all gendered language but that’s just me.
The English language will make the change and ‘they’ will become the standard gender neutral pronoun. The change can’t be forced, but it will be naturally adopted as the older generations die off and new generations continue using the English language, realising that the above change is necessary and the only realistic solution. Language is a tool and reflects the culture it is used by. If the culture demands a neutral prononun, a neutral prononun will emerge. ‘They’ is the only presently viable candidate.
Says whom?
FWIW, I’ve heard people in the English West Midlands use the “a’” form of generic pronoun, just as in Shakespeare’s day. And that was long before anyone was “woke”.
They.
This is precisely like asking, “If evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?”
There’s a lot of bad assumptions to unpack here. The first is that language that’s deemed unprofessional is somehow also incorrect. Using the word “motherfucker” would also be frowned on in most professional settings; that doesn’t mean that “motherfucker” is ungrammatical, it just means that it’s not appropriate to that context. Similarly, there’s nothing ungrammatical about “ain’t,” it’s just considered an informal usage, and as such, not appropriate in some contexts, including many professional fields.
Secondly, what is and is not appropriate changes over time. Nobody cares anymore about who/whom, or splitting an infinitive. These formerly important “rules” fell to the wayside simply because people stopped following them. There’s nothing inherent to the language that required them, just as there’s nothing inherent to the language forbidding “ain’t.” If enough people start using it in a formal context, it becomes formal language. Much like biological evolution, this is not an instant or uniform process. Some professional fields are going to resist changes like this longer than others - law, I imagine, is going to be more resistant than, say, the video game industry.
Just a reminder: most millennials are currently in their thirties. Some millennials have kids in college. You need a new catchphrase for your “kids these days” old man rants.
The rules of grammar art like the rules of physics. They aren’t rules that mustn’t be broken, they are observations about how things function. If we discovered something that travelled faster than the speed of light, we don’t lecture it for doing physics wrong, we rewrite the laws of physics to explain how the thing we discovered. Similarly, “ain’t” doesn’t “break the rules of grammar,” it’s a part of the grammar in several dialects of English. Which, again, is not the same as saying it’s acceptable in all contexts. Judges and other lawyers might react badly to you if you use “ain’t” in a courtroom. But at the same time, the fellers down at the honky tonk ain’t going to look kindly on someone throwing around a bunch of “whoms.” Neither usage is more correct than the other, but both have their appropriate contexts.
To put this back in an evolutionary context, it makes no sense to say humans were “wrong” to evolve to breath air, but we’ll still drown if we go sit on the bottom of a lake.
It has already changed where I live. It might not yet have changed where you live. But where you live doesn’t have any more claim to “correct” English than where I live.