I’m pretty Nazi when it comes to grammar, but one rule I consistently ignore is using “they/their/they’re” when I mean the singular “he or she” or “his or hers” or “he is or she is.”
I think most people do this to the point that they don’t even think about it anymore. Saying, “When does a person usually pay their bills?” is much more efficient than saying “When does a person usually pay his or her bills?” The latter comes across as ostentatious.
Will we see “they/their/they’re” become a gender-neutral singular pronouns in Webster’s dictionary in our lifetimes?
It’s hard top say, really. I have heard of it showing up in other Germanic languages, especially those that are being influenced by English. That could indicate that it has some sticking power. On the other hand, it’s not part of a long term trend. You can be pretty certain that at some point the plural of fish is going to be fishes, because it’s part of a hundreds-of-years-old trend that shows no sign of changing. English pronouns have been undergoing some change. We’ve lost the t-v distinction, plural pronouns have flipped around. Dialects are constantly inventing and then discarding new second person plurals (ya’ll, youz guys, etc.). So that instability indicates to me that a there’s room for some innovation to stick around, but it’s not exactly pervasive.
On the other hand, it’s not the only contender. Once upon a time “he” was a perfectly acceptable gender-neutral pronoun depending on the context. “One” shows up plenty. So who knows. The one thing I will say is that linguistic change pretty much always occurs on a subconscious level. Language is unreasonably complex and regular, and defies any attempt to regulate it in the long run. So what ultimately decides how English is going to look in a hundred years isn’t going to be because that’s how we all agreed it would happen. It may very well happen that lose all gender-specific pronouns because phonological change has rendered pronunciation difference between he and she indistinguishable.
I would say most definitely, since Merriam-Websteraccepted their use in this way some years ago.
This is an old usage that goes back centuries and was used by Shakespeare and others. It fell out of favor for a while but now is coming back.
A number of authoritative sources accept this usage, although not all do (yet). It may be a few decades before the stodgiest prescriptivists accept it.
Everyone who doesn’t agree with Lemur866 that “they” is singular is a faux pedant. Right.
I object to its use in speech and writing.
Shakespeare allegedly used they as a singular. Everyone who trots that out fails to cite it, though, and I won’t look for it because I don’t treat Shakespeare as the be-all and end-all of the English language. You’d think that hack was a fucking saint.
I’m on vacation, so I don’t have the cites to back this up, but–
It’s been acceptable ever since the pronouns “they/their” were borrowed into English from Old Norse! You can find plenty of examples of singular “they” in such illustrious authors as Shakespeare, and even in the King James Bible (which led to the hilarious Language Log post, “Singular They: God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It”).
The current “he” as a gender-neutral pronoun was basically invented by grammarians (and finally solidified by an act of Parliament). But whatever the force of prescriptive grammar books behind it, you can tell that “he” and “his” have never worked as gender-neutral pronouns in English! I mean, can you say, “Either grandma or grampa forgot his slippers”? No; you have to say “their slippers.”
The question is when these silly prescriptivist grammar rules are finally going to drop off the face of the Earth.
Most people are fine with it, but some people are really, really against it. But prescriptivists will never go away, nor will their complaints about the English language ever make sense since it’s not based on real linguistics. When I took history in high school and college we had to write history papers in which we weren’t allowed to use contractions. So the whole thing is screwed, really. If you ever become enough of an established expert in something, however, you can talk however you’d like and no one would have the position to question it. If I were the world’s leading mathematician, I’d describe a new type of number - just like how there are irrational numbers, negative numbers, prime numbers and imaginary numbers. And I’d make sure I described something really important just so I could name them completely-fucking-absurd numbers so no one would be allowed to say squat because I’d be the world’s leading mathematician. But until that happens I can’t use contractions in my history papers.
Shakespeare made a mistake. Unless he’s more perfect than all the popes rolled into one or like the belief of Bible literalists that 500 years worth of editors didn’t change a syllable.
I deduce that the slippers are unisexual — or gramps and granny are hermaphrodites.
“His” and “he” are no more silly than a singular “they,” and a lot less so, political correctness (the real reason for the change) aside.
Using “he” for a unisex singular and thereby ignoring its gender is exactly the same kind of solution as using gender-neutral “they” and ignoring its number. Neither solution is intrinsically more logical than the other. Given modern sensibilities about gender equality, it’s not surprising that the latter is becoming the preferred solution.
I mean we can argue back and forth about whether it’s a mistake or not. (I think, rather it’s telling of how the brain handles english at a deeper level. If people, without thinking use they and their as singular pronouns, that, to me, says that they and their are singular pronouns in the language and the his part has to be applied like some sort of edit mask at a higher level.)
But, really, you cannot seriously argue that it’s a political correctness issue because A) when people complain about those damn PCers, they automatically lose the argument and B) it’s been a part of english since long before PC was a thing.