“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”
The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.
Thanks!
I have always loved the OED. As a kid I used to sit in the library and just read it. It was always a dream of mine to buy my own copy and just have it the way people used to have encyclopedias.
Well said! My go-to example is ‘If someone calls and I’m not here, tell them they can leave a message’ because it covers both they and them in a singular usage.
Sidenote: I also hate the way that some people act like languages are static things, despite the known history of languages to shift and change over time. English is arguably a German creole; we don’t get to act all sanctimonious now.
If we actually followed the “your gender identity is mildly inconvenient to me so should be banned” crowd and made everything unambiguously gendered, language would become far more awkward.
“If someone calls and I’m not there, tell him or her that he or she can leave a message”.
We could start doing this right now – every time
theyhe or she uses the word “they”, insisttheyhe or she repeatsthemselveshimself or herself in a way that leaves no gender ambiguity…That could get really awkward if some of the neopronouns become common.
“… tell him or her or zim or xyr or thon that he or she or ze or xe or thon can leave a message… “
That’s a good explanation. English isn’t my native language, and I always found the they/them weird sounding. With that sentence of the customer you made it click for me. Thanks!
i had an English teacher in high school that insisted sentences like this were grammatically incorrect (subject/verb disagreement, number), and should be, “Every customer should be greeted when he or she walks into the store,” or “All customers should be greeted when they walk into the store.”
I found them annoying.
“They” is the traditional English-language pronoun when an unknown person could be of either gender. “Mommy, my teacher said a funny thing at school today!” “Oh? What did they say?”
Teacher is singular, but assigning a gender would feel awkward if one doesn’t know, so “they” is used instead.
Why not just pick new words to use?
Because the current word for it works just fine?
And also because when people try to use neopronouns they take as much flak for that if not more. Imagine this same argument: “I’m not used to these newfangled pronouns. Why can’t they just use normal ones?”
As someone speaking German, a brutally gendered language, let me tell you, they/them is awesome and I’d love to have something similar in German. There is so much fighting and discussions about “gendern” and it consumes so much energy that could be better spent elsewhere. And conservatives are having a field trip with this.
Looking for a new word is equally as hard if not way harder than using what already works fine.
Yes I would love for the German language to have an equivalent for they/them. It’s also so awkward talking about someone who is non binary and neither uses he/him nor she/her and you always have to refer to them by their name.
We have that in French, the amount of discussions the new pronoun (“iel”, as a mix between “il” et “elle”) is absurd
It’s not though. Singular they goes back to middle English (14th century) it was just grammar Nazis in the 18th century that tried to stamp it out.
i didn’t know that. i genuinely thought it was a new/contemporaneous usage.
TIL
It was more for an unknown individual than a known one, but extending it the way it has been is a very natural progression
So an example where you don’t know the individual would be
Somebody left their umbrella in the office. Could you please let them know where they can get it?
The more modern extended usage that people seem so up in arms about would be
Kate left their umbrella in the office. Could you please let them know where they can get it?
Well done. I do occasionally find the singular “they” confusing, but not always, and I wasn’t quite sure why. Now I know. Thanks!
one always thinks of a plurality of people
Speak for yourself! I don’t immediately think plural when “they” is used.
Using “one” yet it refers to multiple people, my days.
IMO only one person is allowed to use the one pronoun: Keanu Reeves
Person 1: Is your friend Bob coming over? Person 2: No, they can’t make it, they’re busy
One Bob, and we all know it’s one Bob, no confusion. Look for context. It’s not that hard.
Person 1: Are Bob and Janice coming over? Person 2: They can’t make it.
Sometimes additional context is needed.
Your example is unambiguously plural. It’s not a good illustration of “they” creating confusion.
It’s truly not a problem. I could contrive a reason to talk about a couple (they plural) and a nonbinary person (they singular) and end up with sentences where you don’t know which I’m referring to, but the exact same issue happens if I’m telling a story about two “he” or “she” subjects. And it’s solved in the same way.
Person 1: Are Bob and Janice coming over? Person 2: They can’t make it.
Alternative:
Person 1: Are Alice and Janice coming over? Person 2: She can’t make it.
Alternative:
Person 1: Are Alice and Janice coming over? Person 2: Alice can’t make it.
This is far less difficult than you’re trying to force it to be.
Bob said he’s coming, but Janice said they can’t make it.
Bad example. Having the ‘but’ in there introduces ambiguity. We can’t tell if Janice is contradicting Bob and saying they both won’t be coming, or if it’s just Janice speaking for themself.
Agreed it’s a bad example. When already using the specific identifier of names, using general identifiers isn’t needed, and is rarely done. Most people would just say Bob is coming but Janice can’t make it.
One does not (always) do this. The singular “they” is many hundreds of years old.
If it confuses you, then I understand your confusion. Please read about the history of the singular “they” in order to resolve your confusion.
https://www.oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-they
Why not choose new words? Languages evolve in a complex way. One reason is that “they” is an easy choice. Another reason is that many speakers react harshly to unfamiliar pronouns, therefore it promotes acceptance to use familiar pronouns in new ways. I wrote with the Spivak pronouns for years, but that led to more distraction than understanding, so when “they” emerged as a standard, I adopted it.
Really? I used they when I wasn’t sure of gender (online games for example) before the pronoun use became common. I cannot remember anyone ever being confused.
Conservatives would probably get mad about that too so “they” works just fine
Me talking at dinner: “Will you pass me the peas?” Cut to 5 people confused about whether I mean just one of them or if I want the whole table to all hand me the peas.
I get why they/them can be confusing because of the plural thing, but we are used to a quirky language. With a little practice, the tone and context clear up nearly all confusion. The rest is as easy or hard as what we have to do with an ambiguous “you.”
PS Sorry to the “yous/yous guys” people. I am not trying to turn a blind eye to you obviously superior usage. It just really ruins my point.
You say “with a little practice,” but there’s no practice needed when it’s already part of our language. I guarantee every English speaker complaining about it uses “they” as a singular pronoun quite often.
I rather enjoy “y’all” as a plural second person pronoun. =D
If you don’t know someone’s gender, what do you call them? Like, what if they present in a really ambiguous way? Or what if you’ve never even met them? Like say you’re about to sit down at a restaurant, and you notice a jacket on the seat, would you tell the hostess, “excuse me, I think the last person to sit here left their jacket.” Or would you just be unable to refer to them because you don’t know their gender?
I love the irony of this comment lol
Sadly, many educational institutions still teach a prescriptive form of English that fails to acknowledge this, but singular “They” is decades older than using “You” instead of “Thou” as a singular second-person pronoun. It was already in common use way back in Shakespeare’s time. If thou thinkst this confusing, change thyself before demanding others change for thine own comfort.
Also, some people are plural, so the ambiguity of “they” is inclusive to them.
Also-also, the only other pronouns in common use that aren’t explicitly gendered are “it/its”, which some people find dehumanizing. Nonbinary and agender folks often (but not exclusively) prefer “they/them” over “it/its” or neopronouns.
Also-also-also, “picking new words to use” is extremely non-trivial for pronouns because it requires the entire English-speaking population to relearn fundamental communication habits. It’s much easier to simply accept the fact that singular they is extremely common.
Also, some people are plural, so the ambiguity of “they” is inclusive to them.
Like the former Queen of England’s royal we?
Yeah!
The Royal “We”, aka the “Majestic Plural”, is the use of a plural pronoun to refer to a single person holding a high office.
For plural folks, using a plural pronoun to reference the multiple persons existing within a single body is also appropriate (though I don’t know if that usage has a fancy name yet~). And when referencing these persons individually, we just use their own pronouns the same as with non-plural folks. 🤓
The first paragraph sounds like the royal we, and the second paragraph sounds like dissociative identity* disorder, lol
They’re calling that one “Dissociative Identity Disorder” these days, and it’s clinically distinct from plurality.
DID is usually a trauma response, one marked by memory gaps as the separate personalities are partitioned off from one another. One can’t switch identities consciously, but rather does so involuntarily as a stress response.
Plurality is usually benign and doesn’t involve notable memory gaps as the different alters can be co-conscious and are not strongly partitioned apart. Plural individuals can often switch which personality is “fronting” consciously. Rather than a disorder, it’s an uncommon form of neurodiversity.
Thank you for the correction, it was mostly my mind blending DID and the outdated MPD together.
I guess it is notable form a grammatical perspective, though I can’t say I’d personally put it at the same level as the gender-neutral/singular “they”.
I’d be interested if there’s some sort of biological basis for plurality (as there is with being transgendered, for instance). The wikipedia page describes it as an online subculture, mostly akin to roleplaying (from my impression), so it doesn’t feel like it should be in the same category, lol
I have had a plural friend since before they started building communities for themselves online and the consistency of their identities over the years leads me to suspect that there is a biological basis, but the scientific research on the topic is still in its infancy.
That said, there is some adjacent research that seems to point in that direction. The Internal Family Systems Model is a perspective on psychotherapy that begins with the assumption that all individuals contain multitudes, and works to restore mental balance and harmony by identifying the disparate parts of one’s self and addressing the conflicts between them. There are multiple studies over the last three decades showing therapies based on that model to be effecatious for the treatment of depression, anxiety, trauma, phobias, and other psychological symptoms in some populations, and the practice was formally recognized as being evidence-backed in 2015.
If I’m not mistaken, similar psychotherapies were/are used to treat DID. Generally, it works better to treat the patients as they want to be treated…for instance, treating all identities separately rather than telling them “You are just one person, stop this switching nonsense!” lol
I’m also thinking about this from a more… sociological (?) perspective, where everyone has different “selves” or “masks” for different situations. A work self, a home self, an online self, a friends self, etc… this is completely normal, and everyone does it. Plurality sounds to me like trying to say that these are all distinct individuals, which seems like DID in an extreme case, or a matter of roleplaying (or similar).
I guess I’m still having difficulty grappling what Plurality really is. It almost seems to me like an equivalent to someone deciding to call their inner monologue (something normal) the voice of god (something “special”), and making a community around that.
Thou shouldst campaign for the resurgence of a second person singular pronoun as well.
This is typical for the English language.
There used to be thou, which was a singular form of you. However, thou also implied you were talking to someone at or lower that you were. Eventually, it became seen as rude to call someone thou, so its usage dropped in favor of a uniform you.
A singular they fits this role, as the gender isn’t defined enough to use he or she and the use of it would be seen as an insult.
confusing and difficult
It’s really not, if you try. Have you tried? No. So give it an earnest shot before you lament your woes and push for others to bend over backward for you.
