Perhaps you’ve noticed that in some of my posts, I’ll use constructions like “nobody knows their own strengths” or “when a reader is saddened by a story, they won’t come back”. I’d like to comment a little bit on why I’ve chosen to use these constructions, and why I think it’s justified to do so.

Historically, sentences like these have been considered ungrammatical. When one has a singular subject, such as “a reader”, one generally uses a third person singular pronoun, usually “he” or “she”. To use a plural pronoun in these contexts has been historically considered to be incorrect and in bad form.

However, this leaves an awkward gap in the language. If one’s forced to specify “he” or “she”, it doesn’t leave any options for when the gender of the person is unknown or unspecified. There are a few ways to deal with this, ranging from the rather awkward “he/she” construction to the variety of gender neutral pronouns suggested for English (like the Spivak pronouns).

As language tends to do, though, it seems to be adjusting nicely to the lack on its own, and is filling the void naturally. The third person plural pronouns (they, their, them, themselves) seem to be stepping up in usage to become the preferred method of indicating a person without marking gender specifically. Thus, sentences like “a person is always happy when their pain is relieved” are becoming more and more commonplace. I’ve discussed this a few times, here and here, and it seems like this trend is only increasing.

It would seem that “they” is stepping up as the default third person gender neutral pronoun, and here at Linguistic Mystic, I support that particular facet of language change completely, and have chosen to adopt it early to encourage this change to proceed.

Although it might not yet be completely accepted by the grammarians, I encourage you to begin using the gender neutral third person plural as well, as they can only rap so many people over the knuckles with a ruler before they have to acquiesce, and an army of gender-neutral pronouns sweeps over English departments across the world with the fury of a people forced into fifty years of awkward phrasings.

Well, a man can dream.

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