The Official Linguistic Mystic Pronoun Policy
I’ve gotten a few comments about my frequent use of “they” as a gender-neutral 3rd person pronoun, in sentences like “when a person hears a tornado siren, they should hide”.
I’m aware that that’s not necessarily conventional, and that some even consider it ungrammatical, so, I’ve decided that in order to minimize any potential confusion, an Official Pronoun Policy is needed. You can find it in the top right corner of the page, and there, I explain my reasoning and my official policy in support of “they” as a legitimate third person gender-neutral pronoun.
Perhaps I’m the only person who thinks about such things, but, to misquote Gandhi, we must be the change we want to see in the language.
July 10th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Good to see more support of “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun. I wouldn’t think that it’s ungrammatical; English really needs something like this, it is very tiring writing out “he or she” or “his or her” every time.
July 11th, 2007 at 2:54 am
I thought that ‘they’ for 3rd person singular when talking about a person used to be standard usage.
July 11th, 2007 at 2:55 am
Grammarians often forget that English in not Latin.
July 11th, 2007 at 10:42 am
I actually got into a big fight with someone I considered a friend about this subject, so you’re not the only person who thinks about this kind of stuff. This person felt that it was okay and in fact preferable to refer to an individual of unknown/undetermined/nontraditional gender as “it.” From a feminist perspective, this is definitely not okay — people who don’t fall under the male/female gender binary are already disadvantaged without “it” taking away their humanity. Have you heard about or studied other alternative, gender-neutral, singular pronouns like “zie” (3rd person subject) or “hir” (3rd person possessive)? Those are coming into play in a number of communities that discuss transgender issues.
It’s awesome to see someone take an official stand on this issue with some research to back it up. It makes me feel better about my own “incorrect” usage.
July 11th, 2007 at 10:42 am
It’s been used by many good writers thruout the history of the language… I’d bet a lot of us use it unreflectively in speech. it is completely grammatical.
July 13th, 2007 at 8:52 am
Having come of age in the 1960s, like most (?) of my generation I was well-indoctrinated with the dogmas of feminism, all of which I eventually outgrew as I learned to think; however I do agree that the convention of using the male pronoun to include both sexes makes no real sense. While I acknowledge the prevalence in the vernacular of the “singular they”, I’ve never liked this usage, which seems to me inelegant and, yes, ungrammatical. So … what to do?
In the 1970s I came across a prospectus for an “intentional community” (in New Zealand, as I recall) which, following usage popular at the time among the well-meaning utopian crowd, was using ‘co’ (cos, co’s, coself) in place of the “sexist” generic ‘he’ or the awkward ‘he or she’, etc. In a discussion regarding the question of “non-sex-designating pronouns,” there was an interesting proposal (from a woman, be it noted), from which I quote below. (I never saw anything more about the community, don’t know if it ever happened.)
The anonymous female correspondent wrote [my comments in brackets]:
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“Unfortunately, ‘co’ and ‘cos’ are about as awkward as ‘tey’ [another PC pronoun that enjoyed a brief vogue in those heady days], and consequently will never find their way into everyday use. I have a suggestion you might consider. How about modifying those pronouns already in existence, so that we would have something that sounds less alien and that rolls off the tongue with the ease required of much-used, everyday words?
“For ‘he’ and ’she,’ we drop the sex designation and simply use ‘e.’ There are precedents for a single-letter word in ‘I’ and ‘a,’ so the form is acceptable. It may sound a trifle masculine, but with the common use of ‘e,’ the masculine ‘he’ would then require special emphasis. In any case, the visual effect, especially, would be comfortably neutral. Also, those in the public ear would be able to adopt ‘e’ without taking any real risk, such as appearing affected or strident about non-sexism, and they might very well aid us all in the transition. The beautiful part about it is that sexists would then have to be the ones making a special effort to establish their position — they would have to emphasize the ‘h’ in ‘he’ — something we would hope they’d find increasingly awkward and unpopular. [Not to mention those who would have to emphasize the ’sh’ in ’she.’ But of course feminists are by definition not ’sexist’.]
“As for the other pronouns: ‘him’ and ‘her’ could be replaced for general usage by ‘em’ — also a bit masculine sounding, but actually containing elements of both sex-designates; ‘em’ is already in daily use by children and others as a contraction of ‘them,’ so it would be merely put to a more formal or legitimate use. Easy to say and hear, reasonably innocuous.
“Third are ‘his’ and ‘her’ (or ‘hers’). For these I suggest ‘es.’ You see, while the primary purpose of sexless pronouns is to replace sex-designating pronouns, they will never replace *anything* if they aren’t used in daily speech and print. If one trips over something, one does not adopt it, but rather rejects it. So the secondary purpose in creating such pronouns is to get something that can easily slip into the language. I think that will happen far more easily with ‘e,’ ‘em’ and ‘es’ than with such well-meaning stumbling blocks as ‘co’ or ‘cos’ or ‘tey.’ And once established as neutral words, it won’t make any difference if they once seemed a bit masculine-sounding. They *are* neutral; they mean *all* of us, not some, and that would feel *so* good — to be automatically considered a part of the whole rather be tenuously included (we are never certain just when) or designated ‘other’ in a grammatically all-masculine world.”
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I suppose it follows that the reflexive term would be ‘emself’; anyway, that’s what I’ve been using, along with the pronouns above, whenever it seems appropriate.
I’d never heard of “Spivak pronouns” before the link in this article; I note that Spivak states that although the usage now bears his name, he didn’t make it up himself, but he can’t remember where he first saw the idea. So it seems this mid-1970s article may be the earliest sighting so far.
Be it noted, however, that the proposal above is explicitly derived from the original singular pronouns, while Spivak’s version seems to be a conflation of singular (’e’ in the “original” version) and plural (’ey’ in the “new” version, ‘eir’ etc. in both) elements. (Yes, I know that ‘em’ is apparently derived from ‘them’, but in the proposal above it can be logically constructed from ‘e’ plus the objective ending ‘-m’ from ‘him’, without reference to ‘them’ — but not in conflict with the latter either.)
So this has been my “pronoun policy” for the last thirty years or so. Given how language works, I suppose it’s no more likely to catch on than Esperanto, but still I expect I’ll stay with it, until I’m liquidated for the crime of linguistic incorrectitude.
As for the argument in favor of “singular they”, seems to me it comes down to “It’s what people are doing, and that’s how language works, so we might as well accept it — even go ahead and promote it.” So would you propose the same argument in favor if the rapidly advancing conflation of the two verbs “lie” and “lay”?
E.g., among myriad others I’ve seen in recent years, this sentence in the opening paragraph of the 2007 novel “Storm Runners” by T. Jefferson Parker (an author who seems otherwise in good command of the language): “Tavarez was shy and curly-haired and he stared as Stromsoe lay the mace on the cafeteria table.” And a sentence in the user manual for a hard disk casing I just purchased: “After connecting the drive to the SATA interface on the circuit board, the drive should lay flat on the board.” There seem to be few if any editors these days who would regard these usages as incorrect. Note that the two examples are different: (a) ‘lay’ instead of ‘laid’ as the past tense of transitive ‘lay’; (b) ‘lay’ instead of intransitive present ‘lie’.
So is this an example of “it’s what people are saying, so it must be correct”; or is it simply due to the collapse of anything resembling real education in recent decades? Is there any place at all for prescriptive instruction in language usage, or is the whole idea just too old-fashioned and oppressively patriarchal?
Oh, and as for the generic ‘man’ and ‘mankind’, I generally use ‘humanity’ and ‘humankind’, which are close enough to serve.
Andrew Main
July 13th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Andrew, that’s an incredibly rich comment, I appreciate your taking the time.
As for the question you raised about something being “correct” just because it’s coming into use, I’d like to respond quickly.
I’m quite tempted to say that really, there is no “correct”. There’s “what’s taught in schools” or “what’s used in the prestige dialect”, but really, calling a specific usage “incorrect” has about as much basis as saying that a given flower “shouldn’t” be a certain color. I mean, everybody’s entitled to an opinion, but at the end of the days, speakers will say what they say, no matter what grumpy grammarians think.
I’d also like to take issue with your equation of this to the lay/lie loss. With the third person gender neutral “they”, a hole in the language is being filled. Something is really being gained from it. With the lay/lie loss, it’s introducing ambiguity into the language (albeit to a very limited extent). I’m happy to encourage the use of the third person gender-neutral “they” because I think it increases the capabilities of the language. However, I’m not sure I’d so happily encourage the lay/lie loss, but once again, that’s pretty irrelevant, as if it’s destined to go, it’ll go.
So, I’m encouraging this because, first, there’s no reason for it not to be considered “correct” some day, and second, because I think it enriches the language. I’ve chosen to support “they” over “ey” or “e” or any of the other options because it’s the one that seems to be getting used by speakers. Yes, in a sense, the masses are helping me to calibrate my linguistic compass, but I maintain that anybody setting it differently is likely just deceiving themselves by thinking that they can make a change on their own.
(See, that last sentence would’ve been really awkward without gender neutral pronouns)
July 13th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
The use of they as a gender-neutral (aka epicene) third person singular pronoun in English goes back to the Middle English period. It occurs in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, and a host of other English writers. Search on Language Log for many fine posts about this grammatical feature of English. As for English not being Latin, it should be noted that Greek allows the use of the third person singular form of verbs with a neuter plural subject (treating it as a sort of collective noun).
July 18th, 2007 at 2:09 am
I’ve always loved language change and can’t wait for “they” to take over as the standard gender-neutral pronoun. But I’ve also been waiting for the adverb to die out, the way it did in German, so that adverb and adjective are always the same. Do you think it’ll happen?
July 27th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
Probably, but not across-the-board. It’s already happened in some constructions, such as comparatives. There’s been a discussion in my local broadsheet lately about ‘ungrammatical’ advertisements for our local public transport provider, one of which orders the reader to travel faster, easier, cheaper. I have no grammatical problem with this. On the other hand, the opposition between first-order adjectives and second-order adjectives (modifiers of modifiers), the other role of adverbs, is often required, otherwise a noun-phrase like completely ungrammatical sentence, if it were to become complete ungrammatical sentence, would be ambiguous between the ungrammaticality being complete ([[complete [ungrammatical]] [sentence]]), or the ungrammatical sentence being complete([complete [ungrammatical [sentence]]]). Though in reality, intonation might take over the burden of disambiguation, that is, the seond interpretation might have to surface as complete, ungrammatical sentence.
On a more general note, I completely support the use of singular epicene they and I’ve been using it for years. In my view, pure neologism is destined to fail (clearly though, some neologisms must be successful, otherwise no words would have ever developed). So, all other proposed pronouns, zie, hic, e and so on, won’t take off. They doesn’t need to ‘take off’ as such, because as a lot of peope have been pointing out, it’s been used for centuries. I would furthermore claim that, while singular they still forces a plural inflection on the verb (they are, *they is), a singular reflexive (themself) is permissible. I would then re-write the second-last sentence in your last comment as:
(I realise this is a little late, two weeks or so, but my internet access at the moment is pretty unreliable.)