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This person seems to think using 'they' as a singular is somehow wrong in English. That's not correct. It's been used since the 1500s and it was only when the

This person seems to think using 'they' as a singular is somehow wrong in English. That's not correct. It's been used since the 1500s and it was only when the wave of idiot Victoria grammar prescriptivists started throwing weight around that there was any dispute at all.

shrimp_emoji 7y ago
And, if you're coming from a Romance language, it feels natural to use "plural" pronouns (like "they") for singular subjects because that's the formal way to address people in those languages (when you're being more respectful). It seems like such an efficient solution. (Ironic, too, that it comes from languages where inanimate objects have genders!)
- vsl 7y ago
  I’m a native speaker of one such language, where plural is the respectful form (though lately cultural Americanization imports singular/familiar tone into even business contexts). It has gendered plural pronouns and no natural way to be gender-less except “it”.
Freak_NL 7y ago
I really like how simple it is in English to use the singular pronoun they when the gender of the person you are referring to is not known. I find that it reads a lot better than the compound he/she. I wish we had something similar in Dutch that didn't sound like a kludge. If we do, I haven't found it yet. Interestingly, in Japanese it's rather easy to refer to people in a gender-neutral way if you know either the profession or the name of that person; the honorific suffixes for names (e.g., さん or 様) where we would use Mr/Mrs/Ms don't differentiate by gender in Japanese and professions are often gender-neutral in name. It gets trickier if you don't have that information, because you tend to need he or she (彼 and 彼女 respectively) or one of the very common age bracket and gender specific classifiers like (you who could be someone's) sister (お姉さん) for any adult woman under the age of 35 (or older if you want to flirt a bit). Of course there is always the generic that person (あの方 or あの人). Luckily, Japanese allows you to complete leave out the subject of a sentence and still make sense if the context makes it clear, so there is that.
- michannne 7y ago
  Formal Japanese takes a lot to get into coming from English, but the benefit is that in informal conversation you can reliquish the honorifics to some extent. The con is that there is not that much informal conversation going on especially in regards to work, so polite form grammar should be the default way to speak. On the other hand, polite form still allows you to drop gender specific words, and another note is the way Japanese conversations are formulated, gender is almost never a pre-stated thing, it's usually inferred based on who you're speaking about or who you're talking to.
- Strom 7y ago
  It's even easier in a language like Estonian where there's no grammatical gender or gender pronouns at all. Everything is neutral/universal. Example: He wanted her number -> Ta tahtis ta numbrit. If for some reason you want to give info about the gender you can use words like girl/woman/lady/grandma instead of the pronoun.
amenod 7y ago
Interesting, I didn't know this - thank you! Here is a brief history if anyone else is interested [0]. [0] https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
- Marazan 7y ago
  The thou/you change is particularly relevant. Anyone who complains about 'they' being improper usage who then uses 'you' rather than 'thou' as a singular can go die in a fire.
  - fencepost 7y ago
    Could we maybe just point them to the history of the words instead? Maybe let them suffer in the recognition of their errors?
    - Marazan 7y ago
      I've carefully considered your post and can indeed see the merit. However I do find myself, ultimately, pro fire.
tootie 7y ago
Honestly sounds like the mods were just ginning up for a fight. They would rather force people into compliance with difficult rules while the writer of this piece was looking to reduce conflict. It's not exclusive to LGBTQ+ and is a pretty common theme in any subculture. Some people just live to enforce rules and any chance to create new and obscure rules is like catnip to them. If I can rope this back into something more relatable to the HN crowds, this is like the agile gurus who present an inviolable 87-step process to achieve agility while completely ignoring the actual goals of the process.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  > They would rather force people into compliance with difficult rules Which rules, exactly, would you say are difficult?
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  For the record, on stackexchange, "mod" refers to a volunteer (elected by the community) and "CM" or "Community Manager" to someone employed and paid by SE. I believe you meant "CM" instead of "mod" in your first sentence.
humanrebar 7y ago
The problem is that it's popularly a plural pronoun now, despite any finer points of etymology. Especially going back that far, all sorts of words have had meanings drift. Shakespeare and the King James Bible need footnotes to be intelligible.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jimsug 7y ago
  Well, that's not entirely true either. > The driver's coming at 5pm and they're always on time, so we'll need to be ready for them. Seems pretty unambiguously alright to use it in the singular there, unless there's more than one driver
  - humanrebar 7y ago
    1. It's not clear from your snippet if the vehicle will arrive empty or with passengers. 2. Even if that sentence is unambiguous, it is not hard to come up with sentences that are ambiguous. 3. Colloquially people do all sorts of imprecise and grammatically inadvisable things like "Give 'em a hand." That does not mean the phrasing makes sense for formal, professional, or technical writing. 4. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If people are confused by singular "them" (they are, but someone please do a proper study to confirm empirically), the construct is confusing. 5. If an author feels it is ambiguous in some cases, how do we accommodate that without branding the author insensitive or even hateful? It seems also unwelcoming to not leave room for agency in grammatical decisions.
    - jimsug 7y ago
      Studies around singular they/them: [1] it was in use long before the prescriptivist grammar movement (yes, I know you've raised that this has shifted but I just wanted to highlight that this is not a novel use): https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/328b/81dbcbeba4bf5c7210de59778004c96f57f5.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/328b/81dbcbeba4bf5c7210de59... [2] If the gender of the antecedent/referent is not known, using singular they/them speeds up comprehension. If gender is known, it slows it down compared to using the known gender pronoun: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293036/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293036/ [3] Some nice examples of less ambiguous referents: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1993.11435898 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1993.11... To address your points, though: 1. Not sure where these passengers came from, but sure, if you can insert entities into the referent then any pronoun is potentially invalid. 2. Of course you can, but (a) context will fill in the gaps and (b) if that doesn't work, you can usually interrogate the author/speaker (and (c), if you can't interrogate the author/speaker, then yes, they've failed in their composition - but that doesn't necessarily mean that singular they/them is the problem, or is infeasible in all contexts. 3. Sure, there are many things that are acceptable colloquially and not professionally, and vice versa. Does writing on an internet forum fall more in line with formal or informal writing? I don't think it's clear. 4. See the above; sometimes it "confuses" people, sometimes it doesn't (and the unqualified assumption that it does is perhaps an indication that there's some motivated reasoning at play) 5. I don't myself have any issues with writing to avoid pronouns, however if you pointedly avoid pronouns with one person and then use them with another (let's say you use them with a cis-female and then avoid them with a non-binary person) that's not really welcoming or sensitive, and it seems apt to brand them as such. If you're avoiding pronouns equally in all situations, that's different. But if you're selectively avoiding pronouns where they don't line up with your personal viewpoints, then you might be seen as insensitive or hateful, and you might not be welcome everywhere. That's kind of how life is, and you just need to deal with it.
akvadrako 7y ago
According to most style guides as of 5 years ago, it's only proper English when the gender of the person is unknown, though even that isn't universal - he/she is often preferred.
- Marazan 7y ago
  Style guides aren't how a language is actually used. It's just some people's opinions. I bet the style guide you are consulting says some nonsense distinction between less and fewer.
smudgymcscmudge 7y ago
That may have been fine in 1500, but in modern, American english the phrase “they is” just makes you sound like an idiot.
- Marazan 7y ago
  So would saying "you is". You are an idiot. They are an idiot Thou is an idiot if you want to be 'correct'.
  - smudgymcscmudge 7y ago
    I'm talking about third-person pronoun, not second. Sentences like "They is in the office".
    - Marazan 7y ago
      You'd say "They are" just like you say "You are" not "You is" for second person. English isn't some precisely specified 1 look ahead formal grammar.

shrimp_emoji 7y ago

And, if you're coming from a Romance language, it feels natural to use "plural" pronouns (like "they") for singular subjects because that's the formal way to address people in those languages (when you're being more respectful). It seems like such an efficient solution. (Ironic, too, that it comes from languages where inanimate objects have genders!)

vsl 7y ago
I’m a native speaker of one such language, where plural is the respectful form (though lately cultural Americanization imports singular/familiar tone into even business contexts). It has gendered plural pronouns and no natural way to be gender-less except “it”.

Freak_NL 7y ago

I really like how simple it is in English to use the singular pronoun they when the gender of the person you are referring to is not known. I find that it reads a lot better than the compound he/she. I wish we had something similar in Dutch that didn't sound like a kludge. If we do, I haven't found it yet. Interestingly, in Japanese it's rather easy to refer to people in a gender-neutral way if you know either the profession or the name of that person; the honorific suffixes for names (e.g., さん or 様) where we would use Mr/Mrs/Ms don't differentiate by gender in Japanese and professions are often gender-neutral in name. It gets trickier if you don't have that information, because you tend to need he or she (彼 and 彼女 respectively) or one of the very common age bracket and gender specific classifiers like (you who could be someone's) sister (お姉さん) for any adult woman under the age of 35 (or older if you want to flirt a bit). Of course there is always the generic that person (あの方 or あの人). Luckily, Japanese allows you to complete leave out the subject of a sentence and still make sense if the context makes it clear, so there is that.

michannne 7y ago
Formal Japanese takes a lot to get into coming from English, but the benefit is that in informal conversation you can reliquish the honorifics to some extent. The con is that there is not that much informal conversation going on especially in regards to work, so polite form grammar should be the default way to speak. On the other hand, polite form still allows you to drop gender specific words, and another note is the way Japanese conversations are formulated, gender is almost never a pre-stated thing, it's usually inferred based on who you're speaking about or who you're talking to.
Strom 7y ago
It's even easier in a language like Estonian where there's no grammatical gender or gender pronouns at all. Everything is neutral/universal. Example: He wanted her number -> Ta tahtis ta numbrit. If for some reason you want to give info about the gender you can use words like girl/woman/lady/grandma instead of the pronoun.

amenod 7y ago

Interesting, I didn't know this - thank you! Here is a brief history if anyone else is interested [0]. [0] https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...

Marazan 7y ago
The thou/you change is particularly relevant. Anyone who complains about 'they' being improper usage who then uses 'you' rather than 'thou' as a singular can go die in a fire.
- fencepost 7y ago
  Could we maybe just point them to the history of the words instead? Maybe let them suffer in the recognition of their errors?
  - Marazan 7y ago
    I've carefully considered your post and can indeed see the merit. However I do find myself, ultimately, pro fire.

tootie 7y ago

Honestly sounds like the mods were just ginning up for a fight. They would rather force people into compliance with difficult rules while the writer of this piece was looking to reduce conflict. It's not exclusive to LGBTQ+ and is a pretty common theme in any subculture. Some people just live to enforce rules and any chance to create new and obscure rules is like catnip to them. If I can rope this back into something more relatable to the HN crowds, this is like the agile gurus who present an inviolable 87-step process to achieve agility while completely ignoring the actual goals of the process.

Pfhreak 7y ago
> They would rather force people into compliance with difficult rules Which rules, exactly, would you say are difficult?
MauranKilom 7y ago
For the record, on stackexchange, "mod" refers to a volunteer (elected by the community) and "CM" or "Community Manager" to someone employed and paid by SE. I believe you meant "CM" instead of "mod" in your first sentence.

humanrebar 7y ago

The problem is that it's popularly a plural pronoun now, despite any finer points of etymology. Especially going back that far, all sorts of words have had meanings drift. Shakespeare and the King James Bible need footnotes to be intelligible.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jimsug 7y ago
Well, that's not entirely true either. > The driver's coming at 5pm and they're always on time, so we'll need to be ready for them. Seems pretty unambiguously alright to use it in the singular there, unless there's more than one driver
- humanrebar 7y ago
  1. It's not clear from your snippet if the vehicle will arrive empty or with passengers. 2. Even if that sentence is unambiguous, it is not hard to come up with sentences that are ambiguous. 3. Colloquially people do all sorts of imprecise and grammatically inadvisable things like "Give 'em a hand." That does not mean the phrasing makes sense for formal, professional, or technical writing. 4. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If people are confused by singular "them" (they are, but someone please do a proper study to confirm empirically), the construct is confusing. 5. If an author feels it is ambiguous in some cases, how do we accommodate that without branding the author insensitive or even hateful? It seems also unwelcoming to not leave room for agency in grammatical decisions.
  - jimsug 7y ago
    Studies around singular they/them: [1] it was in use long before the prescriptivist grammar movement (yes, I know you've raised that this has shifted but I just wanted to highlight that this is not a novel use): https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/328b/81dbcbeba4bf5c7210de59778004c96f57f5.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/328b/81dbcbeba4bf5c7210de59... [2] If the gender of the antecedent/referent is not known, using singular they/them speeds up comprehension. If gender is known, it slows it down compared to using the known gender pronoun: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293036/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293036/ [3] Some nice examples of less ambiguous referents: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1993.11435898 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1993.11... To address your points, though: 1. Not sure where these passengers came from, but sure, if you can insert entities into the referent then any pronoun is potentially invalid. 2. Of course you can, but (a) context will fill in the gaps and (b) if that doesn't work, you can usually interrogate the author/speaker (and (c), if you can't interrogate the author/speaker, then yes, they've failed in their composition - but that doesn't necessarily mean that singular they/them is the problem, or is infeasible in all contexts. 3. Sure, there are many things that are acceptable colloquially and not professionally, and vice versa. Does writing on an internet forum fall more in line with formal or informal writing? I don't think it's clear. 4. See the above; sometimes it "confuses" people, sometimes it doesn't (and the unqualified assumption that it does is perhaps an indication that there's some motivated reasoning at play) 5. I don't myself have any issues with writing to avoid pronouns, however if you pointedly avoid pronouns with one person and then use them with another (let's say you use them with a cis-female and then avoid them with a non-binary person) that's not really welcoming or sensitive, and it seems apt to brand them as such. If you're avoiding pronouns equally in all situations, that's different. But if you're selectively avoiding pronouns where they don't line up with your personal viewpoints, then you might be seen as insensitive or hateful, and you might not be welcome everywhere. That's kind of how life is, and you just need to deal with it.

akvadrako 7y ago

According to most style guides as of 5 years ago, it's only proper English when the gender of the person is unknown, though even that isn't universal - he/she is often preferred.

Marazan 7y ago
Style guides aren't how a language is actually used. It's just some people's opinions. I bet the style guide you are consulting says some nonsense distinction between less and fewer.

smudgymcscmudge 7y ago

That may have been fine in 1500, but in modern, American english the phrase “they is” just makes you sound like an idiot.

Marazan 7y ago
So would saying "you is". You are an idiot. They are an idiot Thou is an idiot if you want to be 'correct'.
- smudgymcscmudge 7y ago
  I'm talking about third-person pronoun, not second. Sentences like "They is in the office".
  - Marazan 7y ago
    You'd say "They are" just like you say "You are" not "You is" for second person. English isn't some precisely specified 1 look ahead formal grammar.