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"They" is a gender neutral pronoun, used out of respect when you don't know the gender pronoun someone goes by, and don't wish to be presumptive.
by 4oh9do 4y ago
"They" is a gender neutral pronoun, used out of respect when you don't know the gender pronoun someone goes by, and don't wish to be presumptive.
- b112 4y ago[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shwoopdiwoop 4y agoYou are confidently incorrect.
- b112 4y agoOr mayhap I know what difference lay, between it and they?
- ojkelly 4y ago> The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf. https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
- IncRnd 4y agoYes, but the first sentence of that article reads, "Singular they has become the pronoun of choice to replace he and she in cases where the gender of the antecedent – the word the pronoun refers to – is unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary, or where gender needs to be concealed." According to your article, because the name of the actual person, Gustave Eiffel, is known the correct form of address is "Gustave Eiffel". Otherwise, no reader really knows who or how many people "they" references.
- na85 4y agoNah, it's exceedingly common to use "they" as the indefinite gender singular. I remember seeing this in the 90s. Example: "If a person wishes to avoid jail, they would be wise not to commit crimes." No other word except the gross "he/she" construction makes grammatical sense in lieu of "they".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- IncRnd 4y ago
- na85 4y agoThat's not the same sentence, now is it?
- IncRnd 4y agoIt's a more pithy sentence that conveys the same information.
- na85 4y agoDespite this new revelation that it's possible to rephrase a sentence to avoid using a word, that's completely orthogonal to my point which is that "they" has been used to indicate the singular person of indeterminate gender for at least 30 years. I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to demonstrate.
- shreyshnaccount 4y ago
- SirSavary 4y agoThat's a completely different sentence? This is like arguing that passive voice is always correct and one should never use active voice under any circumstance.
- doctor_eval 4y agosoooo... > Amazingly cool that it understood it had to make the statue handle winds in the harbor.
- the_only_law 4y agoTechnically correct, the favorite of pedants.
- IncRnd 4y ago> "It" is the gender neutral singular pronoun, "they" is plural. Not exactly. "They" is not commonly recognized as singlular. While "they" has occasionally been used as a singular in certain instances for at least 700 years, those cases are generally isolated and are considered poor uses of the language. "It" and "one" are both third-person personal pronouns that are gender neutral. "It" is far from the only gender neutral singular pronoun. > EG, when someone calls, or is at the door, people often ask "Who is it?" "Who" is an interrogative pronoun in your sentence, "who is it?" Who is gender neutral but does not have the power to be singular or plural, since it is interrogative.
- bradrn 4y ago> Firstly, "they" is not commonly recognized as plural. While "they" has been used in certain instances as plural for at least 700 years, those cases are generally isolated and are considered poor uses of the language not standard usages. Sorry? ‘They’ is universally recognised as a third-person plural pronoun, and as such it is the standard way to refer to a group of people in English. That it is additionally used as a gender-neutral singular animate pronoun does not change this. If you consider ‘they’ to be non-plural, I would be very interested to know exactly what you do consider to qualify as a third-person plural pronoun in English.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- IncRnd 4y agoYou are absolutely 100% correct. It was a sad typo on my part from typing too quickly for my own good. I hope what I wrote is now more cogent. Thank you.
- bradrn 4y agoThank you! I appreciate the correction. Unfortunately, I cannot agree with this either: > "They" is not commonly recognized as singlular. Personally, I’d say that ‘they’ can act as both a third person animate singular and a third person gender-neutral plural pronoun, in just the same way that ‘you’ is both a second-person singular and second-personal plural pronoun. True, the singular usage of ‘they’ isn’t quite as common as the plural usage, but as a native English speaker I’ve never seen singular ‘they’ as particularly unusual.
- tobr 4y ago> "Who is it?" “It” is not used here because we don’t know the gender. Consider “Who is she?” for example, which is a very different question. > "It was Bob!" Why wouldn’t we say “He was Bob!” in this case, since the gender is presumably known? Because “He was Bob” and “It was Bob” mean completely different things.
- IncRnd 4y agoThe comment was worded poorly, since it was not clear if "they" was gender neutral, singular or plural, which could have referred to Gustave Eiffel and the sculptor. Either would have fit in that situation. However, it is even more acceptable to refer to someone by their name, in this case Gustave Eiffel, instead of only using pronouns. Furthermore, "the architect" can be used, since it singularly denotes a specific person. There are many constructions that are better than using the imprecise "they".
- shreyshnaccount 4y agoThey probably refers to the people who had say in the design process :/
- saalweachter 4y ago> The comment was worded poorly, since it was not clear if "they" was gender neutral, singular or plural, which could have referred to Gustave Eiffel and the sculptor. Either would have fit in that situation. Does it matter? Sometimes you want an imprecise "they".
- IncRnd 4y agoIt matters when the writer wishes for the reader to understand the written words as intended.
- jimmygrapes 4y agoColloquially and in context, "they" means "people back then" and nothing more. Calm down.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- usrusr 4y agoCan't wait for the day the anti gender neural start referring to mixed groups as "hers and hims", they will be the flat-earthers of language.
- dang 4y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31786562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31786562.