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The perspective from someone who learned English as a first language is that it's just as annoying a linguistic issue as it is to those who learned English late

The perspective from someone who learned English as a first language is that it's just as annoying a linguistic issue as it is to those who learned English later. Those of us raised on English likewise have a bad time with ambiguous gender situations ("he/she"). Used to be just "he" when ambiguous/irrelevant, but sociopolitical outrage over possible misapplication of the pronoun discourages such use, so our choice is either the obnoxious "he/she" (raising the issue of alternate applicability in a context where it really doesn't matter) or the now-common but still irritating singular "they" (ignoring the plural definition, and implying attempted reconciliation for the originating sociopolitical angst).

SilasX 11y ago
Agree about it being annoying for native English speakers as well, but I don't think you have to be PC to balk at the use of "he" for the ambiguous case. Brains work by association, and forcing "he" to do double-duty is simply confusing. For example, let's say you tell a story and refer to a generic surgeon as "he", when some patient's father is known to be far away. Later, you have the surgeon saying "I can't operate on this patient; he's my son!" People will feel deceived if it turns out the surgeon was a woman after you used "he" to refer to her, and no amount of lecturing about how "'he' is a perfectly fine for ambiguous cases" is going to change this. Btw, Douglas Hofstadter (somewhere in Metamagical Themas) made a great point that the use of "they" vs "he" for the generic singular being an issue of whether people are more offended at being called a man when a woman or multiple when singular. There are fewer interest groups looking out for the latter...
- SamReidHughes 11y ago
  > I don't think you have to be PC to balk at the use of "he" for the ambiguous case. You're right. When I was a kid, I'd go with "they" for both ambiguous and the generic case, simply because it's illogical to have an arbitrary assumption, which is maybe a post-hoc justification that I made as a teenager. Eventually I ended up trying to train myself to use "he" in the generic case, because it seemed to me like my habit was just super-semantic nerdiness. But for the ambiguous case, if it's talking about a specific person, but whose sex you don't know, it'd still be very weird to not use "they".
- ctdonath 11y ago
  "There are fewer interest groups looking out for the latter..." As an introvert, I find the implicit plurality of "they" more disturbing than gender ambiguity of the known-singular "he/she". I'm not a group, I'm a singular self, and the speaker/author shouldn't apply a plural to a known singular; being an anonymous audience/subject, gender ambiguity is more understandable.
cmdkeen 11y ago
"now common" - the singular they was used by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Thackery and Shaw. Traditional grammar types might not like it but that doesn't mean it is some new usage.
- ctdonath 11y ago
  I didn't insinuate it was "new usage". I've seen it go from rarely & uncomfortably used to, as I said, "now common".

SilasX 11y ago

Agree about it being annoying for native English speakers as well, but I don't think you have to be PC to balk at the use of "he" for the ambiguous case. Brains work by association, and forcing "he" to do double-duty is simply confusing. For example, let's say you tell a story and refer to a generic surgeon as "he", when some patient's father is known to be far away. Later, you have the surgeon saying "I can't operate on this patient; he's my son!" People will feel deceived if it turns out the surgeon was a woman after you used "he" to refer to her, and no amount of lecturing about how "'he' is a perfectly fine for ambiguous cases" is going to change this. Btw, Douglas Hofstadter (somewhere in Metamagical Themas) made a great point that the use of "they" vs "he" for the generic singular being an issue of whether people are more offended at being called a man when a woman or multiple when singular. There are fewer interest groups looking out for the latter...

SamReidHughes 11y ago
> I don't think you have to be PC to balk at the use of "he" for the ambiguous case. You're right. When I was a kid, I'd go with "they" for both ambiguous and the generic case, simply because it's illogical to have an arbitrary assumption, which is maybe a post-hoc justification that I made as a teenager. Eventually I ended up trying to train myself to use "he" in the generic case, because it seemed to me like my habit was just super-semantic nerdiness. But for the ambiguous case, if it's talking about a specific person, but whose sex you don't know, it'd still be very weird to not use "they".
ctdonath 11y ago
"There are fewer interest groups looking out for the latter..." As an introvert, I find the implicit plurality of "they" more disturbing than gender ambiguity of the known-singular "he/she". I'm not a group, I'm a singular self, and the speaker/author shouldn't apply a plural to a known singular; being an anonymous audience/subject, gender ambiguity is more understandable.

cmdkeen 11y ago

"now common" - the singular they was used by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Thackery and Shaw. Traditional grammar types might not like it but that doesn't mean it is some new usage.

ctdonath 11y ago
I didn't insinuate it was "new usage". I've seen it go from rarely & uncomfortably used to, as I said, "now common".