11–20 of 71 posts
I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
Right now, it is a cultural marker. If you run a linguistic use analysis, you see that it is used on the coasts and a few key urban areas in the US and it hasn't made progress toward universality.
1: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h...
I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
Right now, it is a cultural marker. If you run a linguistic use analysis, you see that it is used on the coasts and a few key urban areas in the US and it hasn't made progress toward universality.
Frankly, I think even people offended at being forced to use the former usage will relent. Refusing to accommodate (rightly or wrongly) is confrontational, and being confrontational is exhausting. It's already quite natural to use singular they when using a passive, impersonal voice, and using a passive voice is what people will invariably resort to when they're exhausted.
I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
Considering singular they has been in common use for centuries[0], changing it now would be an uphill struggle. People have used words like "ze" but they haven't caught on. [0] https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
It's kind of odd, because people seem to accept singular "they" for strangers, but not once there's a name. If I say: "I bumped into a stranger on the street and trod on their toes, apologised to them, and they apologised to me" - generally (in normal spoken conversation, not here when we're paying attention) people don't care. Using singular "they" for strangers is pretty common, and hundreds and hundreds of years o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering singular they has been in common use for centuries[0], changing it now would be an uphill struggle. People have used words like "ze" but they haven't caught on. [0] https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
Its use with an unspecified antecedent is centuries old, but usage for specific persons is not. Time will tell whether it'll catch on.
I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
Considering singular they has been in common use for centuries[0], changing it now would be an uphill struggle. People have used words like "ze" but they haven't caught on. [0] https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
Based on that, I propose we push for ‘it’ as a sole singular pronoun (and keep ‘they’ for plural, as knowing if someone is referring to one or many is far more useful in almost all contexts than knowing whether they are referring to a man or a woman (or ship, or country, etc.), and those few contexts where it is relevant should be easy enough to glean from other information.
If you think that could never work, I'd point out that Mandarin managed without gender-specific pronouns until contact with Europeans, and even now they are only distinguishable in written form.[1]
Alternatively, there's Stallman's proposal for ‘person’, ‘per’ and ‘pers’.[2] I'm doubtful of any proposal that involves creating new words (see ‘xe’, Spivak pronouns, etc. ), but everything else Stallman says seems to come to pass so maybe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English#Decline_of_g...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's kind of odd, because people seem to accept singular "they" for strangers, but not once there's a name. If I say: "I bumped into a stranger on the street and trod on their toes, apologised to them, and they apologised to me" - generally (in normal spoken conversation, not here when we're paying attention) people don't care. Using singular "they" for strangers is pretty common, and hundreds and hundreds of years o…
This shouldn’t surprise you. Most people can infer gender from visual appearance alone with well over 99.99% accuracy without being explicitly told. If you know their name and other gendered indicators, it would be a marked anomaly NOT to know their gender.
So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly reflects our values as a society, as language often does, but that's kind of my point.