this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
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It was beaten into me in school that this is incorrect. “They” is to be used as a plural pronoun only. It’s commonly used in the singular, but it’s wrong according to the English teachers I had. In referring to a person, you must choose either he or she under those grammar rules.
With that said, maybe it’s time for me to move into the future and accept that the meaning of the word has changed. I am confident those English teachers weren’t concerned about actual gender issues. Now, I think those issues are more important than the technical grammatical issues of English.
I’ve offended people in a social setting by insisting that this is the correct usage, when truly it was just me being autistic and informal rather than political.
Perhaps it was the English teachers who were wrong.
Correct or not, people have been using it like that for a while.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Fascinating! I didn’t know there was an article about this.
That’s more than official enough for me!
"Ma, I'm a boy!"
I adore how callous that sentence sounds.
It used to be correct APA/MLA formatting to use “he/she” when the gender of a subject was unknown. That was changed back in the mid 00’s I think. The preferred format is now “they” over “he/she”.
That being said, people use singular they/them all the time in casual conversation. We just aren’t used to using it when we know or think we know the gender of the person. But let’s be honest, there have always been people that have been hurt by being misgendered. Hell, it was common for some racists to use they/them with black women in an attempt to dehumanize them. So this idea that the singular they is new is absolutely ridiculous.
Ok, even there we have bigger issues. How can literally mean figuratively?
Oh yeah, that one is absolutely terrible and I will die on that hill. Figuratively speaking.
"literally" being used to mean "figuratively" dates back to 3 years after the word "literally" began meaning "actually". If this is a hill to die on, you need to use "literally" exclusively to mean "as written in the texts". Common usage of "literally" to mean "actually" and "figuratively" both date to the 1590s
No one uses literally to mean figuratively. They use it to emphasize regardless of if what they're emphasizing includes figurative language. Nearly every word that means something similar to "in actual fact" undergoes this semantic drift (actually, really, etc).
"She literally exploded at me." is similar in meaning to "She totally exploded at me." Not so much to "She figuratively exploded at me."
I looked into this for 3 minutes and found examples in multiple languages.
Neat.
New expression-insight remix into the human condition connected; We literally really actually feel the need to be sure we're understood, no matter the hyperbolic lengths gone to, huh?
Colloquialization. Get enough people using a new word, or existing word in a new way, and it will eventually be added to the dictionary.
I accepted the inevitable downfall of mankind when “unfriend” was added in 2009.
But fetch still hasn't happened. :(
Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen. It’s not going to happen.
I'm curious when and where "singular they" was taught as incorrect. Coming from the Midwest in the 80s (not exactly a liberal or forward thinking place), I was taught in no uncertain terms that singular they was appropriate in many circumstances. And my teacher was old as hell, so her education on the matter probably dated to around WW2.
It must not be specifically gated on time. My instruction was rural East Coast. I’ve learned however just from the article posted in this thread that a singular third person has been in use for centuries, even recognized as such an official contexts.
Someone higher up this thread linked an article that singular they has been in use since the 14th century
I think of that like I think of the anti ain’t and anti Oxford comma stances. They weren’t entirely correct, they were enforcing the style of the time for educated use of English. Today educated use of English still doesn’t include ain’t, but it does use the singular they for people of unknown or nonbinary gender, and it uses the Oxford comma.
The language keeps evolving and stuff like this is part of that. Hell at one point the singular they was far less controversial than the singular you
The exclusion of the oxford comma is a really good example of grammar that's a bit outdated. It's far clearer to use it. Dropping it used to make sense when we used typewriters and ink, but in a digital world it makes no sense.
It's not correct though, it's a style choice. Just like it's not incorrect to avoid the Oxford comma.
I know a lot of people have a hard on for Strunk & White, myself included, but this is one stylistic choice that is now outdated.
Yeah I told exactly one friend it wasn’t proper English and they were so offended. They were. So, so offended.
Yeah, if I recall the English classes from my language institute, They is only plural and the X cannot be used to neutralize masculine/feminine nouns.
Right. And at the same time, language is an evolving practice. New words are created all the time. Maybe, this issue was worth it to change the rules.
Madness. If you want to use gendered stuff, use one of the romance languages or German.
Why did they teach you this. Your singular teacher. What were they thinking?
It was like, one different teacher per every two months during a total of 16 months. It was the same in British english
Grammer rules are rooted in racism or classism pretty much every time. At least when they're used to exclude someone instead of teach someone how to speak the language.
I’ve never heard this before. Would you have an example? Because if so, I’m about to get a lot less grammatically correct.
When someone says "you sure is" instead of "you are", or wants to "axe" you a question, we are taught to consider them wrong. But they're not. They're just speaking a different dialect of English. Just like people from the UK call bathrooms "the loo", and people from India say "do the needful". There are loads of different dialect of English, and it's racist to consider the "black" dialect stupid or incorrect. It's not wrong, it's just another dialect.
It counts as a dialect when a significant number of people use a certain version of the language.
I’m getting the sense that correctness in language is a bit of a fool’s errand. It’s a relative term.
Yep. Language is only as good as it's ability to transfer information. English is a good language (IMHO), not because it has good rules to follow, but because it can be flexible in order to transfer new ideas. Want to steal a word from another language? Want to verb a noun? Want to create a new word by gluing two other words together? Want to add a new definition to an existing word? Yes, yes, yessir, and bet.
Well, you can start from the fact that language is a living, changing thing. The only real rules of the language are descriptions of how people are using the language. Even after they put rules to it, those rules have had to evolve as speakers change how they use English. It's not like we still use Shakespearean English as the standard of correctness anymore.
So, the set of rules that are written is just a description of how some people are using the language at the time. Can you take a guess which people's use these rules are based on? You can bet it isn't going to be the black people. And then these people can use these rules, which are just a description of how they use English, to say black people are wrong.