Stylebooks Finally Embrace the Single 'They' (cjr.org)

Two major style manuals are now allowing the singular use of "they" in certain circumstances. While this is a victory for common sense, the paths taken are unusual in the evolution of usage. From a report on Columbia Journal Review: Both manuals, the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style, emphasize that "they" cannot be used with abandon. Even so, it's the middle of the end for the insistence that "they" can be only a plural pronoun. To recap: In English, there is no gender-neutral pronoun for a single person. In French, for example, the pronoun on can stand in for "he" or "she." English has no such equivalent; "it" is our singular pronoun, so devoid of gender that calling a person "it" is often considered insulting. We could use "one," but that is a very impersonal pronoun. Consider this sentence, for instance. "Everyone needs to be sure to tighten ____ safety belt before approaching the cliff." The article adds: For hundreds of years, anyone writing formally would default to "he." Advances in women's rights led to the clumsy "he or she." Many writers alternate "he" or "she." This twisting and turning is because what's known as "the epicene they" has been considered incorrect. [...] But that's not the "they" the style guides have let loose. Simply, the singular "they" will be allowed if someone prefers that pronoun.

Comments

Hoo-ray!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's to he or she who finally decided this!

Re:Hoo-ray!

[LifesABeach]

Ebonics rises again! LOL

How

[aoism]

How is this related to tech in anyway whatsoever?

Re:How

[Rakhar]

Maybe it's targeted at all of the grammar nazis that pop up when the summary of a grammer article uses the wrong pronoun for its own example...

  "Everyone needs to be sure to tighten HE safety belt before approaching the cliff." Yup, I would totally default to "he" in that example. Thanks, summary!

(I'm aware that that isn't the intent of the article, but that's how the summary is presented.)

Re:How

[Quirkz]

"Everyone needs to be sure to tighten THEY safety belt before approaching the cliff." ... aah, doesn't that feel better?

And yes, I noticed the same thing. Example could at least use the same word form as the headline.

Re:How

[LifesABeach]

A nomination for the Ig-Nobel committee?

Re: How

[slasher999]

You misspelled "grammar" there the second time you used it.

Re:How

[FrankHaynes]

Even when the sex of the antecedent is known, we should encourage people to de-humanize all of us by using "they". Besides, sex is messy. EWWW!!

Re:How

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, English already had / has a genger nuetral (compound) pronoun.
We like to keep it secret 'cause, when the time arrives, that's how we'll tell them from us;
but I digress. Anyway the word is "ir" and it's generally used with a definite article.
You gots air, right? And you have their, such that the sentence would read -

"Everyone needs to be sure to tighten their safety belt before approaching the cliff."

Something that is taught to the "right" people as early as second grade, if you get my drift.
Anyway, that's the secret. Please don't discuss it with them; they certainly do the same with U.S.

CAP === 'playtime'

Re:How

[DogDude]

Slashdot isn't about tech exclusively. It's for nerds. There are all kinds of nerds, including grammar nerds.

Re:How

[xevioso]

It is news for nerds, though. Grammar nerds.

Re:How

[Njovich]

The Slashdot tagline is 'News for nerds, stuff that matters'. Many of the most active discussions on Slashdot have had very little to do with tech. If you want a tech site, just visit a tech site. If you don't like an article on Slashdot, skip it. If you don't like the articles of Slashdot in general, just leave.

Nope, I'll use he, she, they, there, their etc...

[p51d007]

"Everyone needs to be sure to tighten __their___ safety belt before approaching the cliff."

none of the examples work

[bugs2squash]

Everyone needs to be sure to tighten he safety belt before approaching the cliff

Everyone needs to be sure to tighten they safety belt before approaching the cliff

Re:none of the examples work

[wonkey_monkey]

Reminds of Reginald D. Hunter being asked what he knew about some famous person who'd passed away:

"Well, I know he dead."
"I think you mean 'he died.'"
"No, at first he died. Now, he dead."

"While this is a victory for common sense"

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Heh. For half of Indo-European population that learned English as a second language, speaking as one of those people, it's more of a constant confusion than anything even resembling common sense.

Re:"While this is a victory for common sense"

[93 Escort Wagon]

It sounds as if you've truly mastered English, then!

Shows the arbitrariness of style books

[phantomfive]

Singluar they has been used at least since Shakespeare's day.

Re:Shows the arbitrariness of style books

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That's why there's a notion of an idiolect. Different people to prefer to write and speak in different ways and there's seldom absolute rights or wrongs, especially in a language like English without an official governing body. Singular generic "they" hasn't been wrong for centuries. Singular generic "he" hasn't been wrong for millennia. From the perspective of today, both fit some people's idiolects.

Already A Pronoun For It

[Fieryphoenix]

One wonders where one's language went.

Very poor example.

[whoever57]

Everyone needs to be sure to tighten one's safety belt before approaching the cliff.

Perhaps the pronoun "one" matches "Everyone"?

Also, how about this: Everyone needs to be sure to tighten the safety belt before approaching the cliff.

Re:Very poor example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another poor example is the use of French as an example of a language that "does it right". French has the pronouns "il" (he, singular), "ils" (he, plural), "elle" (she, singular), and "elles" (she, plural). There is simply no neuter pronoun. In common speech, you can use the indeterminate third person "on", which is closer to the English "you" ("on peut aller a gauche ou a droit" [you can go left or right]). However, in general, French is very sexist* when speaking in the third person. If the gender is unknown, it always defaults to the masculine, and in the plural, if the gender is unknown for a single single member of a group, the masculine is used.

German is similar to English in that there is a masculine, feminine and neuter pronoun, but the neuter is never used for people. However, the gendered pronoun problem is largely moot due to the way they use the indeterminate third person and the formal second person. The indeterminate third person ("Mann", as in "Mann kann links oder rechts gehen" [you can go left or right]) is generally accepted as proper speech. English is a bit awkward with polite imperatives; the use of the third person in commands provides the requisite social distance without compromising the command (eg, "passengers must put their seat belts on" instead of "put your seat belts on, passengers!"). The German formal second person in imperative form provides the requisite politeness without requiring a gender neutral third person pronoun. ("Bitte gehen Sie nach links" [please go left]) is a very common construction.

Spanish is the only language that I know of that has a fairly elegant solution: you can omit the pronoun and it is inferred from the conjugation and declination. So if you don't know the gender you can just omit the pronouns entirely ("Dijo que no sabia" translates as "He or she said that he or she didn't know").

*: Whether this is truly sexist is up to debate; I tend to think not but others think so.

Re:Very poor example.

[mjpaci]

Can't have a discussion about the German language without referencing Mark Twain's The Awful German Language: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback...

Re:I don't see it

[Nemyst]

Unfortunate that the two words have almost nothing in common then, right? "One" comes from the Germanic ancestry of English which itself took it from Latin and it meant "one" the whole way through. The French "On" actually comes from the Latin "homo", or human being.

What's more, even ignoring etymology, the two words have basically opposed uses: "One" is very formal and impersonal, whereas "On" tends to be favored in informal speech. It also really is not a good gender-neutral pronoun and is basically never used as such in French, which still favors the masculine form as the gender-neutral form.

Nonsense

[OhPlz]

This is nonsense. "He" has always been the default in English when the gender is unknown or not relevant.

French using "on" is no different than referring to an unknown person as "one" in English. We don't use "one" that way very often because it doesn't sound right because we're used to using "he" instead. Of course it sounds impersonal, it's not using "he" or "she". It's meant to be impersonal!

Re:Nonsense

[bill_mcgonigle]

It's an education thing. People who know how English evolved know that 'he' can be both masculine or neuter, depending on context. It's been that way since before 'ye', 'thou', 'thy' and similar words went away.

People who are uneducated may assume that 'he' is only masculine and will choose to feel oppressed about it. I can't imagine how bad those people feel using romance languages where half of the nouns are masculine gendered.

It's somewhat awkward, but less so than losing the singular/plural distinction. Style guides are a useful reference, but feel free to ignore their inconsistencies and poor suggestions.

Re:Nonsense

[green1]

And people who are even more educated know that the singular "they" has been in use for centuries and is perfectly acceptable.

Missing quotation marks

[ChrisMaple]

"Advances" in women's rights

Re:Nope, I'll use he, she, they, there, their etc.

[aix tom]

That's why I would probably say "Make sure your student brings the f***ing book to class." in style.

Re:Nope, I'll use he, she, they, there, their etc.

[mczak]

No, actually "everyone" is indeed singular, hence it should be "everyone needs to be sure to tighten his safety belt". Albeit "their" sounds quite acceptable to me here. But if you'd say "Everyone are here" (pretending it's indeed plural), that would sound wrong to me.
But in any case, I'm not a native speaker, so what sounds ok to me may not be the right answer :-).

Yeesh

[markdavis]

>"Consider this sentence, for instance. "Everyone needs to be sure to tighten ____ safety belt before approaching the cliff."

Sorry, that is easy and was solved hundreds of years ago and without using "his". The answer is "one's".

"Everyone needs to be sure to tighten one's safety belt before approaching the cliff."

Stylemanual...

[Bartles]

...is newspeak for the word newspeak.

Re:What a bunch of pompus crap

[SirSlud]

I love people who complain when faced with nobody forcing them to do anything at all.

One

[Roger W Moore]

That's to he or she who finally decided this!

I think you mean "That's to the one who decided this". English already has a perfectly good third person singular, gender-neutral pronoun, 'one', which you can use when referring to people as opposed to things.

Other usages that are changing

[Solandri]

Other shifts I've noticed in general vernacular over the last 30 years:

• Less vs. fewer. Countable items are supposed to use 'fewer' ("10 items or fewer"). Non-countable items are supposed to use 'less' ("less water"). But nowadays I hardly ever see 'fewer' being used. Nearly everyone uses 'less' for both cases.
• "and I" vs "and me". When I was young, the common error was to use "and me" when you were supposed to use "and I". e.g. "My wife and me went to the party" is incorrect. "My wife and I went to the party" is correct. The frequent correction by grammar nazis caused people to overcompensate, and now they say "and I" even when they're supposed to use "and me." e.g. "The dog sat by my wife and I" is incorrect. "The dog sat by my wife and me" is correct. A quick way to test is to eliminate the conjunction. "The dog sat by I" is clearly wrong, while "The dog sat by me" is right. So in this case you're supposed to use "and me".
• Who vs whom. As with "and I" vs "and me" above, who is a subject, whom is an object. But almost everyone uses 'who' for both subject and object now.

BTW, my solution to "he or she" in writing was to simply add a slash - "s/he". One extra character and the same number of characters as "they". Unfortunately there's no way to pronounce it, so when speaking I usually use "they".

Don't even get me started on the silly rules about punctuation inside or outside quotation marks, which prioritize conformity over meaning.

Re:Other usages that are changing

[thegarbz]

I literally died reading your post.

Wonder

[Stormy Dragon]

Do the people so outraged by the singular they also insist on still using "ye" and "thou" on account of "you" being purely a plural pronoun?

Re:Nope, I'll use he, she, they, there, their etc.

[mysticgoat]

Yes, the AC has proved his point about the difficulty of learning English by demonstrating that even they* does not know proper English usage, even though they* are self-acknowledged English experts.

*Note that "they" in the above sentence is appropriate under even the more stringent style guides as there is insufficient data in the context to determine if the antecedent of the pronoun is a male with hemorrhoids or a female with PMS.

Re:I don't see it

[green1]

The funny part is that every inanimate object in french has a gender, but they have a way of talking about people without gender, meanwhile in english we realize that inanimate objects don't need a gender, but somehow insist that people must have one.

That said, the singular "they" has been quite acceptable in most forms of english for many, many, years now.

Re:Nope, I'll use he, she, they, there, their etc.

[Zaelath]

The more I look at it, the more I agree. Though some people would suggest you're casting them as multiple people with "are".

I'm not sure there is an example where you can't replace "is it" with "are they" in English, albeit several style manuals would disagree.

The last business writing course I saw insisted that conversational English was preferred anyway, yet still had an opinion on the Oxford Comma; they didn't like it.

Re:Nope, I'll use he, she, they, there, their etc.

[james_gnz]

Bastardizing the use of "they" is broken, but I guess that fits with all the rest of the "rules" of the this language... no point in being logical now :-)

As someone else has pointed out, "they" has been used as a singular for some time (see singular they). Also, the second person plural "you" is used as a singular in exactly the same way (i.e. it's grammatically plural, we say "you are", not "you is", but can refer to a single person), and even the the first person plural "we" is sometimes used as a singular (i.e. the "royal we"). Since this covers all the plural personal pronouns, it is arguably consistent, in a way. :-)

Isaac Asimov

[Zobeid]

I recall that in IASFM (yes, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), Asimov once wrote an editorial which covered this subject. Although I don't have that anymore, I think I recall the gist of it pretty well. He noted that a number of science fiction writers over the years had attempted to invent gender-neutral pronouns for the English language, but none had ever gained any traction. Asimov then pointed out that English already had gender-neutral pronouns that work just fine, in the form of "he" and "his". It's rarely difficult to tell from the context when they are being used in a gender-neutral way. The awkward "he or she" construct was a solution to a non-problem.

So, I think I'll stick with Asimov on this. However, I have to admit to being stodgy in my writing habits. I still refer to The Elements of Style (which Asimov also recommended), not to mention Webster's 2nd Edition (the "dord" dictionary), and I still capitalize God (yes, even when He is referred to by pronouns), and I still believe that "flammable" is not a real word and shouldn't be used outside of warning labels that must be understood by semi-literates.

Re:One

[skids]

Some person started yelling at me in olde english the other day. I have no idea what one wanted.