3 ms·

At least in modern usage, "They" is flawed. For starters its plurality is ambiguous.

• dragonwriter 12y ago
  > At least in modern usage, "They" is flawed. For starters its plurality is ambiguous. In the cases where it is used in a gender-neutral but expressly singular sense, this is false. In cases where whether the number of the referent is ambiguous and might be either singular or plural, the use of the plural they has been acceptable longer, and has never been objected to even by the prescriptives who have tried (and are still trying, though their influence has waned somewhat from its late 19th Century height) to force generic he in place of singular they as part of their effort to impose Latin-inspired grammar rules on English.
  • sliverstorm 12y ago
    dragonwriter had some interesting things to say. However, they used a lot of hand-wavy claims. That sounds normal to you?
    • dragonwriter 12y ago
      The only structural problem (and its a minor one, since the resulting ambiguity is readily resolvable from context) I see with that is that there are two different possible referents for "they" in the preceding sentence; in this particular case the fact that there are both singular and plural uses of "they" is relevant to why both referents are possible, but you can run into the same ambiguity with gender and number specific pronouns. Of course, there's no real good reason to use a pronoun there except for an excessive fondness for choppy sentences.
• eru 12y ago
  That's why we should use `thou' again and don't rely on `you'.