4 ms·
With the English language as it currently stands you need to know a person's gender in order to talk about them in a normal, non-stilted way and without drawing
by bloak 8y ago
With the English language as it currently stands you need to know a person's gender in order to talk about them in a normal, non-stilted way and without drawing attention to you not knowing their gender.
Did the use of the words "them" and "their" in the previous sentence seem natural to you? Probably it did because they referred to a generic "person". However, if I'd referred to a named individual, "Chris", say, using "them" or "their" then I think you would have immediately felt some weirdness.
It's not that unusual nowadays, I find, to meet people whose gender is not obvious so it would be good to fix this linguistic problem, but I can't imagine it getting fixed overnight.
- aaronblohowiak 8y agoSingular them/they isn’t that weird and is easily normalized through exposure.
- bloak 8y agoThat is almost certainly true, but there isn't yet much exposure. For example, in the article linked to below there are a couple of instances of "they" referring to a named and identified person, and the reason for using "they" is obvious and explained in the article. Nevertheless, I noticed I needed an extra fraction of a second to process mentally the sentences in question. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44575229 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44575229 Singular "they" used in that way is certainly a lot less weird than Spivak pronouns or "xe" so even if those two are, perhaps, technically superior solutions I would guess that singular "they" is what people will (continue to) use.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]