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Comment by bicubic | Hacker News Reader

'Vincent is in the lobby, do you want to meet them now?' Them who? Vincent and his unannounced friends? Maybe Vincent is actually 3 kids stacked on top of each other in a trench coat?

They is not singular. Replacing gendered pronouns with 'they' shits the flow of the sentence and creates ambiguity. There's a whole class of expressions that just stop working without a singular pronoun, hence the proposed 'ze' or whatever it is these days.

And what do you propose for all the languages where nouns and verbs and adjectives are gendered? In Russian, using gender-neutral phrasing when speaking about someone is an insult that implies that they're a thing rather than a person.

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"They" is commonly used as a singular third-person gender-neutral pronoun in English — so much so that it's often unconscious. I glanced through your comments; you used it yourself just yesterday [1]:

> Anecdote time: a friend from one of the nation's major universities was involved in a road authority funded study to evaluate the safety impact of newly installed speed cameras at several intersections. [...] They found there was none.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18532386

Edit: after I replied, you edited your comment to add the caveat "except sometimes in 3rd person". "They" is always a third-person pronoun, and there are no criteria that would make it acceptable only in a subset of situations.

Edit 2: now the caveat is gone. Can you just reply to me rather than changing what I'm replying to retroactively?

Your comment-stalk sample is bad though because that could easily refer to the administrators of the study or everyone who ran the study. The sentence you are trying to link to it is about the friend being involved in the study, not being the one coming up with findings.

> Vincent is in the lobby, do you want to meet them now?' Them who? Vincent and his unannounced friends? Maybe Vincent is actually 3 kids stacked on top of each other in a trench coat?

My them example was in reference to the parent's phrase, not a general prescriptive. And in your example, while them would be a bit odd, from context you can gather them refers to Vincent alone. If there were further people one would likely be saying Vincent and his children are in the lobby, do you want to meet them now? In either case, I was primarily referring to they.

> And what do you propose for all the languages where nouns and verbs and adjectives are gendered?

I don't. I was explaining they usage that a lot of english speakers seem to not be aware of. I agree with this linguist: https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/08/singular-they-prono...

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