Scanned the article, can someone give me a solid example of how this is used in a sentence?
"Alex has decided that they no longer want to be addressed by a gendered pronoun, and has requested that we all refer to them as 'they' and 'them' from now on." edit: I'd be interested in understanding why people find this very real scenario to be so downvote worthy. Is it because you find the idea of non-gendered pronouns upsetting, or because you think my example is unrealistic for some reason? Or something else en…
Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year
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Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year
#72They be utterly pretentious. Germanic languages have gender. Language change should be natural, not forced based on some nebulous social engineering goal. Speakers of Old English considered each noun to have a grammatical gender. If anyone has a serious citation for "he" was imposed by "meddling grammarians", please let us know. Don't we already have a neutral pronoun: "it"?
There are lots of citations about this on the web and even a whole bunch in past HN threads. This is one of the more fascinating articles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-onlanguage-...
Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The author would have done well to include several examples, and they doesn't include any examples. There's your example.
I think jpmattia was joking. But it's fascinating how, when someone mistakenly thinks that it's a new proposed rule and tries to apply it, they frequently come up with an awkward overcorrection, when they're almost certainly already using it naturally in their own speech without noticing. If anyone wants examples there are 500 years' worth here: https://web.archive.org/web/20150328135337/http://www.crossm... . And as…
Honestly, with the way the comments are for this article, it's impossible to tell.
Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year
#74I've never liked this, but I have to admit that logically, a mismatch in number is no worse than the mismatch in gender we get by using "he," which has the disadvantage of being annoying to many people. And I don't think efforts to make up a new pronoun are likely to succeed. Singular "they" might well be the future. But if I could have my pick I'd go with "um."
If someone wants to understand, they only need to examine it beyond what they learned as rules in English class.
The use of "they" is usually general, when not really pointing to a specific person. If Dennis is standing in front of me, and someone asked me whom to speak to, I wouldn't point at Dennis and say, "They is the one to speak to".
But if I was talking about DennisP online, and I didn't know who was behind that vague identifier, and someone asked whom could help, I might say, "I talked to DennisP earlier, and they helped me with my problem."
For all I know, "DennisP" is an organization, or shared account. It's a vague generality, when the individual attributes of a person are unknown or irrelevant.
It's like when one speaks in general ways that apply to all mankind, and you might even use the word "you" to refer to, not YOU, but anyone.
"They" works great because a group is a vague fuzzy kind of thing. In the plural form, speaking of them, over there, and their attributes, it's not so much about the plurality, as it is the abstract fuzziness of it.
All that we're doing is applying that same fuzziness in the direction of what could possibly be a smaller target in terms of numeration.
That is why, I don't think those rules about singular and plural were ever really correct. It isn't the numbers that we were trying to convey with the words, but the fuzziness.
"He" and "She" are referencing specific object types with common properties across the whole of the specific object. Whereas "They" is referencing an object with either mixed or unknown properties.
Do you see what I'm saying? It isn't about the count, but the uniqueness of known attributes for a specific target. It just so happens that when you have many of an object, the commonality of attributes blurs, and so the "they" pointer appears to be about the number of objects. Then some people who aren't thinking beyond that get upset if you violate the number when using they to point to >1.
When really, it's just about fuzz.
I don't use "they" as any kind of feminist thing. I just think that "he or she" is not only incredibly distracting and inefficient, but it is the illogical one. Also referring to fuzzy things as "he" or "she" are both wrong, because they are trying to instantiate objects using a template that requires certain attributes when the properties of the spoken of object are unknown or irrelevant to the conveyed concept.
"He" when the boy template is needed. "She" when the girl template is needed. "They" when a fuzzy generic container works better. The number of people references is irrelevant. Just like how an organization may contain many people, but we refer to it as if it were a person. Even an individual person is an organization of smaller components.
Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The interesting thing is that the singular usage of "they" doesn't get used with singular verbs. It seems that the syntactic pluralness of "they" is too strong for it to simply get thrown in place of "he" or "she" without changing the verbs. I would say "she is here" or "he is here," but not "they is here."
One of the things I find weird in English is you do that too “you”: “you are” even when talking to a single person; whereas in French (for instance) there are two different pronouns for the singular and plural use of “you” (“tu” and “vous”), with different forms forms for the verbs. So using plural form of verbs with singular “they” does not seem that surprising to me.
Likewise, "they" is grammatically plural, regardless of its contextual semantics.
Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think thou is second person ("you"), not third ("he" and "she"). We are in need of a second person plural though--at least outside of the South where they have "y'all" and NJ where they have "youse guys".
Don't forget "all y'all" when referring to more than a couple people. "Y'all" is plural, "all y'all" is more plural.
For instance, suppose you know a family of people. Two people out of that family are currently visiting you. You might say "Y'all should bring the whole family over next time; all y'all are welcome anytime." The first "y'all" refers to the two people visiting; the "all y'all" refers to the whole family.
Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year
#77Scanned the article, can someone give me a solid example of how this is used in a sentence?
You see it in notifications from social apps. "Jenny has started following you. Follow them back", etc. Because a lot of apps don't ask people to enter their gender they just resort to "them" instead of "him" or "her". It's really as annoying as people just using "her" everywhere just to be safe.
Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year
#78Tell CMOS then. You are in the same state after all. They said (tee hee hee) this: A. I’m afraid your gender-neutral pronoun (at least in the sense you need) does not exist in our lexicon. I agree that the plural pronoun with a singular noun seems inadequate; I would suggest that you recast the sentence altogether or at least make “mind” plural for agreement: their minds. Other writers alternate between using “his” a…
> The use of they as a singular pronoun is a hot topic in online grammar forums. By traditional standards, the sentence is incorrect because it contains no plural noun for they to refer to. Traditionally, the correct versions are “The telltale sign of right-wingers: they can’t write in English to save their lives” and “The telltale sign of a right-winger: he can’t write in English to save his life.”
> The growing acceptance of they as singular is in response to a need for a gender-neutral pronoun that avoids the use of he to mean he or she. Good writers would make right-winger plural to avoid the appearance of incorrectness or gender bias, but in other sentences the plural is not a good option: “Someone ate my Twinkie, and they’d better watch out!” In those contexts, many language experts now approve of the use of they. You can learn more by searching online for “singular they.”
Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year
#79I've never liked this, but I have to admit that logically, a mismatch in number is no worse than the mismatch in gender we get by using "he," which has the disadvantage of being annoying to many people. And I don't think efforts to make up a new pronoun are likely to succeed. Singular "they" might well be the future. But if I could have my pick I'd go with "um."
The interesting thing is that the singular usage of "they" doesn't get used with singular verbs. It seems that the syntactic pluralness of "they" is too strong for it to simply get thrown in place of "he" or "she" without changing the verbs. I would say "she is here" or "he is here," but not "they is here."
Verb forms agree with the grammatical number of the subject, independent of the semantic number; in English those almost always are the same, but aside from "they", "you" (which is grammatically plural, even though its semantics are sometimes singular) is a case where they can diverge.
Re: Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
"patrickfl didn't bother to read the article, as a result they were uninformed."
"...they was uninformed." I'm not a fan. If we have to go somewhere, I'd rather go with 'it'.