51–60 of 155 posts
But I cannot stand this new trend of making gender irrelevant for the sake of pushing gender lines. We use gendered pronouns for context clues, metadata, and comedy. It's a natural construct and universal to many languages.
They 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"?
When writing "he or she" - they does seem like a viable substitute when gender is irrelevant. But I cannot stand this new trend of making gender irrelevant for the sake of pushing gender lines. We use gendered pronouns for context clues, metadata, and comedy. It's a natural construct and universal to many languages.
When writing "he or she" - they does seem like a viable substitute when gender is irrelevant. But I cannot stand this new trend of making gender irrelevant for the sake of pushing gender lines. We use gendered pronouns for context clues, metadata, and comedy. It's a natural construct and universal to many languages.
I'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."
I've had enough of this discussion! The new gender-neutral singular pronoun is thou ! That's right, thou was the answer we were looking for.
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".
What about "Vou" from the French "Vous" ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
It's a contrived example since the typical use of the singular they is when the gender of the subject is unknown. You might be getting downvotes for complaining about downvotes.
Does this article really not give a single example of use of singular 'they' or did I just read too fast?
> or did I just read too fast? I must have read too fast as well. The author would have done well to include several examples, and they doesn't include any examples. Almost makes me feel like they is pranking me, to be frank.
There's your example.
I have no idea how this doubled up.
They 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"?
The point is that it has nothing to do with language change. It has been settled usage since Chaucer. It's generic 'he' that was the interloper. Ironically, the language engineers of today have most in common with the meddling grammarians who tried (never entirely successfully) to impose it.