Here's a new one.

[conuly]

First, an interesting post from Language Log on singular they when the gender in question isn't.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4475

The only issue I have with singular they is that it overlaps with plural they, but of course nobody complains that plural -s overlaps with possessive 's, and it's the same sort of thing, isn't it? At least, it is if unproofread signs are any indication!

But lots of people don't like singular they, and they don't have to use it. Others might be just fine with it, but rephrase specific sentences to sound more formal and/or less awkward.

Which might explain how an aftercare program came up with the sentence "On days when students are not taking a class, he/she participates in games, art projects, or more." Well, mistakes happen.

Comments

[steorra]

The overlap between singular "they" and and plural "they" is even more like the overlap between singular "you" and plural "you". Which does get inconvenient at times - and leads to interesting innovative disambiguation solutions :-)

Also, I noticed a couple interesting examples of singular "they" in an explicitly gendered context in a student paper recently:

"If a man is used to having a woman sit silently in the background and not contribute opinions, then when a woman does talk it will seem like they are talking a lot."

"A woman is only likely to talk more than men if they are a feminist, an expert on the topic, or it is an informal or private conversation."

The same student could also use singular "they" to refer to a particular identifiable person (the author of the article they were summarizing; the student could easily have made a reasonable guess at the author's gender from the author's name, but may or may not have done so):

"The author ... They wanted to make sure that they had enough evidence to support their claim, and they did."

[conuly]

The overlap between singular "they" and and plural "they" is even more like the overlap between singular "you" and plural "you". Which does get inconvenient at times - and leads to interesting innovative disambiguation solutions :-)

Yes, where ARE the people demanding a return to thou? Even those who oppose all new plurals for the second person have nothing to offer!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I like singuler 'they', but it's somewhat colloquial, so best avoided in formal communication. 'He or she' is all right, but quickly becomes tiresome when repeated, and alternating 'he' and 'she' doesn't work either. It's my understanding that 'ze' refers to a non-gendered or third-gendered individual - it doesn't mean "he or she", it means "person who is neither he nor she". So singular 'they' is the default that makes most sense.

I'm somewhat bemused that singular 'they' is still such an issue, but few seem to notice or care that 'you' is commonly used to mean 'a person ' - any person, not specifically you, though it might be you, or me, or any person one might be thinking of. Argh! Here on the West coast, it seems everybody says 'you' without thinking about it, and my saying 'one' instead is probably heard as an affectation, but I just can't get used to using 'you' to mean "not you".

Off-topic: a while back you mentioned spelling reform. Bizarre as English spelling is, difficult as it is to learn, I don't favor changing it, because the result would be to make the 'old spelling' inaccessible within a generation. Oh sure, translations, everything available via electronic media - not in the form of actual physical books one can read with no power-source but a candle, keep in a trunk for a thousand years - and meanwhile all the old real books are in an obsolete writing nobody learns any more.

[conuly]

And that's probably the reason our spelling system will never be reformed. It's not even a bad reason. It's probably the only good argument against spelling reform there is. I don't think that it actually does outweigh the benefits, though. Not just our spelling but our entire language has changed in the past 1000 years, just as Chaucer said, but we still read it. Heck, we even still read Caesar and all, even in the original. There are still dictionaries, and all the old books could be reprinted with new text if there was demand. Old things aren't all worth preserving just because they're old.

I'm somewhat bemused that singular 'they' is still such an issue, but few seem to notice or care that 'you' is commonly used to mean 'a person ' - any person, not specifically you, though it might be you, or me, or any person one might be thinking of. Argh! Here on the West coast, it seems everybody says 'you' without thinking about it, and my saying 'one' instead is probably heard as an affectation, but I just can't get used to using 'you' to mean "not you".

I'm still hung up on the lack of a non-colloquial plural you form. Honestly, rather than the mess of y'all and youse and yinz and what-all else I'd rather just resurrect thou... Which, I'm told, still isn't totally dead anyway.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

You know, I've never thought about it before... but did thou merge with you partly because of the similarity in blackletter between y and þ. (And the subsequent habit of representing þ with y when printing presses arrived.)

And you're quite correct that thou isn't totally dead, it's still in use around here. Not just in stock phrases like "thee and thine" but in every day speech. But it's not used consistently enough that one can rely on it. (Out of curiosity... you're on the hunt for a non-colloquial 2nd person plural. Presumably your intention with thou is to use that as the singular again, maintaining you as the plural?)

As for you as a third person generic pronoun, I became a lot better at using 'one' in those circumstances after I started learning German. Also got a lot better at who/whom at that point, the single token effort to teach that in school when I was 14 having not really worked. I suspect that most people view these both as affectations of mine, but it doesn't really bother me. My colleagues mostly view my peculiarities with affection.

[conuly]

But you should meet my mother. She has a patented rant on the decline of the pronoun one which involves innocently asking "can you do such-and-fuch?" and getting one's head bitten off with either a. "What, am I your slave?" or b. "Do I look like an idiot to you?", neither of which is helpful when the intended meaning is "Is it possible to do this?"