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Exactly the same amount of ambiguity as "The politician addressed Other Male Politician. He was shocked"...
by notahacker 5y ago
Exactly the same amount of ambiguity as "The politician addressed Other Male Politician. He was shocked"...
- concordDance 5y agoYes, but it still substantially reduces the number of ambiguous situations, which is an improvement to the language.
- Ma8ee 5y agoIf that is your concern, just use the noun. “The politician made a statement to the press. The politician was shocked.” Or if that is too inelegant, reformulate the sentence: “The politician expressed his shock to the press.” Or use the verb to carry the information that you are referring to the singular: “They was shocked.”, but I guess that would be painful to read for some native English speakers.
- cgrealy 5y agoYeah, but there’s no good solution there. If you use a pronoun that can apply to multiple subjects or objects in a sentence, it will always be ambiguous.
- notahacker 5y ago> If you use a pronoun that can apply to multiple subjects or objects in a sentence, it will always be ambiguous. My point exactly. There's nothing inherently unique about singular "they" in that respect. Sure, there are certain circumstances in which a gendered pronoun removes ambiguity, just as honorifics or age/social status based pronouns would remove ambiguity in many instances involving multiple male subjects/objects if English used them (like some other languages do), but that really isn't a reason not to use singular "they" with the same degree of care to avoid ambiguity one also has to use "he" and "she".