Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct (2009)

motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com

45 pointsshawndumas84 comments

I use singular they, and used it through tech interviewing and onboarding recently. It was a real challenge trying to figure out whether I wanted to use singular they during the interview. Correcting an interviewer or recruiter when they get your pronouns wrong is scary (on top of the anxiety that is programming job interviews.)

Over the years in tech I've found all sorts of different responses to me sharing my pronouns -- mostly people being supportive and a bit forgetful. But also people saying some unnecessarily cruel things, or going out of their way to say, "I DON'T HAVE TO RESPECT THAT!".

I've had people tell me, "Yes, fine, I'll acquiesce. But you should know you are wrong and I'm lying to you every time I use singular they."

Ok, sure, but we're colleagues and I'm just letting you know that's what I'd prefer? You can also always just use my name. I'm not going to go to HR if you get it wrong, I'm not going to get mad. I might remind you, but the reminder will be gentle and not accusatory. Why so much aggro?

> I'm just letting you know that's what I'd prefer

Do I always need to accommodate your preferences? Some of them could be hard to, like a frequently used feature of the language over which people have vocal disagreement.

If I do, can I ask you about reciprocal favors in language expressions of my choice? For some such preferences may look arbitrary, all underlying reasoning notwithstanding.

It's surely not a novel thing to have disagreements over language. How in general they are resolved historically?

> Do I always need to accommodate your preferences?

Of course not. I might think it's rude or disrespectful if you willfully disregard my preferences, but at no point did I ever insinuate you must take any action.

It's no different than requesting a certain nickname or shortened name over one's legal name.

> It's no different than requesting a certain nickname or shortened name over one's legal name.

You're asking to be treated more special than everyone else because you're asking for changes in the way people speak, not simply to remember your name (and people have a hard enough time remembering names). It would be similar if I asked to you to avoid a specific set of commonly-used words around me and if you said them, I would perceive it as disrespect. Eventually, people get used to using the right words, but not without effort.

You think your misunderstanding is caused by how Pfhrea formulated their first comment. When they say "I use singular they", they meant they want people use this pronoun to refer to themselves instead of he/she, because (I assume) they are non-binary (ie. neither man or woman).

They don't expect you to use the singular "they" other than to refer to them.

And that's not too hard to remember, you already have to remember whether everyone else is a "he" or a "she"; allowing for "they" is just an extra bit.

And if you do forget it, it's ok, just don't do it on purpose.

How do you feel about "I'll try, but I'll probably screw it up because I'm really not used to this -- sorry in advance."

I kinda feel like I have to say something like that as a hedge. It helps prevent some of the anxiety about messing up.

Totally reasonable to me? Look, at the end of the day we're all humans and many of us were raised with the idea that singular they was weird or wrong. I get it, you've been wired to default to he or she. I have absolutely zero concerns if that sometimes slips and you make a quick correction and move on.

What I take note of are the folks who either make no effort to try or folks who deliberately refuse to use singular they for me. Someone who is trying and getting it wrong sometimes is someone who is trying to support me, which I always appreciate.

Just don't be obsequious when you get it wrong -- I don't need a 3 minute speech about how you really support trans people and you have a trans member of your extended family and how important it is for you and others to get this right. I've had people spend literally 10 minutes on apologies after one slip up.

The part that throws me is verbs. "They want to go for a walk." If we're referring to just one person then it seems it should be "they wants to go for a walk." It sounds horribly wrong but do we really want plural verb forms to also be singular sometimes?

Historically, I guess that's how we've always done it. But now, for people who prefer non-gender-specific pronouns, does it make sense to use plural verb forms when describing their actions, and singular verb forms for everybody else? Won't that get confusing sometimes?

Maybe we should bite the bullet and start treating singular "they" as singular.

No; singular "they" and singular "you" are both grammatically plural. However, if you are using it as singular it is still "yourself" rather than "yourselves", so, it should also be "themself" rather than "themselves" if it is being used as singular.

Makes sense. "Themself" doesn't sound bad to me, really.

Do you wants to go, too?

Heh good point. Thanks for helping me adjust to modern society.

Well now I'm wondering why we have the singular version of the verb. "He want to go on a walk" doesn't sound so bad to me. Only slightly jarring, but also an already common construction in some vernaculars.

I'm not a linguist, but in English it looks more "why are there only two versions of the verb" than "why we have the singular version of the verb".

In French and German (and probably other related languages), verbs have one form per "type" of pronoun. Too a lesser extent, English has that too for some verbs: I am, thou art, he/she is, we are, you are, they are.

But the "I" case is often the same as the "he/she" one, and "thou" fell out of use, leaving only two forms.

I mean. That sounds weird precisely because "you" used to be plural.

Others have already pointed out that you, which used to be exclusively plural, still takes plural verb forms and nobody gets confused.

I'll add that this phenomenon is not restricted to English. On, in French, is traditionally a singular indefinite-person pronoun, mostly equivalent to the pronoun "one" in English (which sounds a bit archaic/formal now, so maybe a better translation is "people in general"). It takes singular third person verb conjugations.

However, nowadays, on has almost completely replaced nous (meaning "we") as a subject pronoun in informal, colloquial speech. But its conjugation is still third-person singular.

"We saw each other" is thus translated in formal speech or writing as "Nous nous sommes vus", and in colloquial speech as "On s'est vu".

> do we really want plural verb forms to also be singular sometimes?

Wait ‘til you learn about scissors and underwear, it’s really going to blow your mind.

I've gotten used to saying "they" when referring to people I don't know. When it comes to people I do know, I prefer "he" and "her" because it still provides context when referring to multiple people while saving on syllables. But I think it's a good thing not to immediately assume gender when referring to someone(one doesn't know) in an occupational role so we get out of the habit of thinking of nurses as "she", for instance.

I really appreciate someone pointing out that "they" is perfectly adequate. Ze and zir are still gendered, and extraterrestrial genders at that.

> I really appreciate someone pointing out that "they" is perfectly adequate. Ze and zir are still gendered, and extraterrestrial genders at that.

I've always been really confused at these weird attempts at pseudo-gender-neutral pronouns when "they" exists. It's like… I'm not a native English speaker. I learned about "they"-as-singular in English year 2. How do native English speakers not know about it? How do you get to "zir" before you learn about something this basic?

Many native English speakers don't know about it because it was technically incorrect when they were taught English ("he" was both gender-neutral and male), and sort of still is, even though language evolves and the gender-neutral-singular "they" has certainly entered the common parlance.

The singular "they" has been in use since the 14th century[1]. But there are plenty of people who speak English as a second language, where their mother tongue has gendered nouns (which includes effectively all European languages except English) -- so it's very hard for them to get over the mental hurdle of having to constantly reference gender in speech. For instance, in Serbian (my mother tongue) you cannot speak in a gender-neutral way because all verbs have different suffixes depending on the gender of the subject.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

It's been around for centuries, but if you're over 25, you were probably taught that it was wrong.

I'm 22, and grew up in Australia -- the concept of singular "they" never sounded strange to me growing up (but I also don't ever recall being specifically taught that it was correct or incorrect). My parents remarked that it was weird that English had this concept which was so foreign to them -- but they probably ran across it when they were getting more fluent in English.

I've never met someone (in person) who has had a strong opinion against the use of singular "they" (though I do know they clearly exist, Stallman being an obvious example). I wonder if it's a cultural difference between where I live in Australia and the US, or if I happened to fall into a filter-bubble of people who aren't against the concept.

I'm 28 and singular-they was taught to me in school; year 2 of English as I said. This is in France which doesn't even have a great track record in producing anglophones.

In French, there is a gender-neutral He and I can assure you you it is nothing like the English one. We quite literally have two very distinct and incompatible "il" ("he") words; the neutral one better translates to "it". (Il pleut => He is raining [sic] => It is raining).

In unknowns, French genders to masculine by default, though some people may choose to disambiguate if targeting a group of people (Same as saying 'He or she' in English).

French has plurals for both "he" and "she" ('hes' and 'shes' => "ils", "elles"). In English, you'd translate both to "they", because you simply do not have plural gender pronouns to work with. "Ils et elles" => "They".

Translating back to french without the disambiguation, we use "Ils". But again, not the masculine one, the distinctly-neutral-albeit-grammatically-masculine-because-french-has-no-neutral-gender one. Which is simply the plural of "it". However, because it's dehumanizing/objectifying to refer to a person as "it", English uses "they".

So there you go:

- Je / Tu / Il / Elle / (Il|Il) => I / You / He / She / (It|They) - Nous / Vous / Ils / Elles / Ils => We / You / They / They / They.

In English, this is all honestly very instinctive. There are only seven distinct pronouns! But that doesn't mean anglophones don't get to think about how to use them in all different circumstances… "they" is a multi-use tool, just like "you".

The serious answer is that in normal colloquial English, they was typically only used as a singular pronoun when talking about an unknown person; for example:

A: Somebody called asking for you.

B: Oh, what did they want?

This has always sounded perfectly natural in colloquial English (at least in the US; I can't speak for other countries). Contrast with the following:

A: Joe called asking for you.

B: Oh, what did they want?

This construction is slowly becoming more widespread, but would have sounded absolutely bizarre and ungrammatical to most native speakers (regardless of literacy/education) before the movement for gender-identity inclusiveness became mainstream, because people didn't really conceive of the possibility of knowing a specific person but not being able refer to them as "he" or "she".

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In response to sibling comments: I think this explanation is a lot more convincing than any variant of "singular they is (or was) wrong". There are two very different kinds of singular they, which elicit very different grammaticality responses from native English speakers.

That doesn't sound any less grammatical than:

A: Joe called asking for you.

B: Oh, what did she want?

(or vice versa if Joe is female)

It turns out that - in a purely objective, language-design sense - the anatomical details (or clothing, whatever) of the bag of meat hosting the specific person this particular use refers to is a really, really dumb way to assign a grammatical gender to a proper noun.

This is sort of an orthogonal issue. Even without knowing Joe's gender, A would have accepted either "what did he want" or "what did she want", under the assumption that B does know Joe's gender.

However, A would not have accepted "what did they want" as grammatical under any circumstances.

> in a purely objective, language-design sense

There is no such thing as this in linguistics.

"Anatomical details" is certainly not the weirdest or most arbitrary-seeming way of assigning noun classes, across the world's languages. Compare e.g. the Ganda language. From Wikipedia:

> ten classes called simply Class I to Class X and containing all sorts of arbitrary groupings but often characterised as people, long objects, animals, miscellaneous objects, large objects and liquids, small objects, languages, pejoratives, infinitives, mass nouns, plus four 'locative' classes

> However, A would not have accepted "what did they want" as grammatical under any circumstances.

Huh, so what do they use when B doesn't know Joe's gender?

> There is no such thing as this in linguistics.

Well, more pedantically: in the sense that it makes determining whether a sentence is grammically correct more dependent (or dependent, if it wasn't already) on random details of the outside world that shouldn't matter until we check for semantic correctness.

> is certainly not the weirdest or most arbitrary-seeming way of assigning noun classes

Of course not, natural langauges (actually by definition) are 'designed' by pseudo-evolutionary processes; if anything, it's surprising they aren't worse.

> It turns out that - in a purely objective, language-design sense

Let me introduce you to many of the world's languages which have a concept of completely arbitrary object gender.

A spoon is feminine in French. It's masculine in german. A fork is feminine in both. Oh and a knife is neutral in german (not in french, which doesn't have a concept of neutral; a knife is masculine. Unless you mean like a dagger… that's feminine.)

You'll note the abscence of genitals, chromosomes, or anatomical details on most of the above.

> but would have sounded absolutely bizarre and ungrammatical to most native speakers (regardless of literacy/education) before the movement for gender-identity inclusiveness became mainstream, because people didn't really conceive of the possibility of knowing a specific person but not being able refer to them as "he" or "she".

I strongly disagree. I don't think responding "Oh, what did they want?" would have ever sounded bizarre or ungrammatical even if this was decades ago and everyone knew that Joe was a man. Language isn't always literal. Using a singular "they" (a pronoun normally used for an unknown person) instead of "he" in that context doesn't necessarily mean the speaker literally doesn't know if Joe is a man. It could just as easily be a subtle way to indicate that the speaker doesn't know Joe very well.

They is overwhelmingly used for plural. See how the wikipedia article starts:

> They is the third-person plural personal pronoun (subjective case) in Modern English.

And only after that:

> Although still controversial,[citation needed] and not officially accepted in formal context,[citation needed] it is also used with singular meaning, sometimes to avoid specifying the gender of the person referred to: see gender neutrality in language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They

You say that, but the singular they has been in use since the 14th century[1] with criticism only becoming prevalent since the 19th century.

Also I would pay strong attention to the [citation needed]s.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

I think part of it is they were trying to draw attention to how ubiquitous gender is, and how much impact it has in apparently neutral language. I've read a whole bunch of sci-fi with hirs and so on, and it definitely does something.

afaik, "ze/zir" is not supposed to be gender neutral, but to have a gender denotation outside he/his and she/her.

"Harper presented to the leadership committee and they were confused."

Is 'they' referring to Harper or the leadership committee?

Clearly "they" refers to the recipient of this sentence. /s

Unlike e.g. German, English doesn't have a gender neutral singular pronoun to use. The only one that fits naturally in most peoples' conversation (and doesn't sound like something uttered by a science fiction-inspired cult) is "singular they".

The gender neutral singular pronoun in German "es" is the same as the english "it". And it would be weird to apply it to a person in both languages.

>Unlike e.g. German, English doesn't have a gender neutral singular pronoun to use.

What German pronoun are you talking about?

My German is very rusty. I was thinking of the different gendered language bits in general rather than pronouns in particular.

Which bits? In German Er is used for such purposes.

Me: says something

You: points out I'm wrong

Me: concedes I'm mistaken

You: continues to question me

Why?

Exactly what point are you making here?

It's true that there is an ambiguity in this particular sentence you've constructed. But that's always going to be possibile when pronouns are involved. Just pick two subjects that share a pronoun, put them in the same sentence, and then use the pronoun. Uh oh!

What if "Harper" were the name of a company? Rejecting singular "they" wouldn't save you then. I would propose that whatever remedy you would suggest for the "Harper Inc." case, you go ahead and apply to this one as well.

I think the point is that the author of the piece has also constructed sentences wherein the ambiguity can be argued away. That doesn't make it more useful, though.

Replacing "he" and "she" with "they" both removes information and introduces an ambiguity in number.

downvoter: am I wrong?

"Harper presented to Jake and he was confused."

Which one is 'he' referring to? Exact same ambiguity.

"Harper presented to Jessica and she was confused." vs "Harper presented to Jessica and they were confused."

"Harper presented to James and he was confused." vs "Harper presented to James and they were confused."

"Harper presented to Sam and he was confused." vs "Harper presented to Sam and they were confused."

"Harper presented to Sam and she was confused." vs "Harper presented to Sam and they were confused."

"Harper presented to the board and they were confused." vs "Harper presented to the board and they were confused."

I'm all for calling people what they want but to assume that it doesn't add context in a lot of situations isn't accurate either.

Better practice (imo) would be to use peoples names more.

"Harper presented to Jessica and Jessica was confused."

"Harper presented to James and James was confused."

"Harper presented to Sam and Sam was confused."

"Harper presented to Sam and Harper was confused."

"Harper presented to the board and the board was confused."

Disagree.

It's reasonable to assume that Jessica is 'she' and that James is a 'he'.

It's reasonable to assume the board is 'they'.

We don't need to contort language to accommodate situations that hardly happen in a lifetime.

Sam, Jamie - sure. But Jessica, James, we know.

Someone who refers to themselves as 'Jessica' but also identifies as male is making a choice to contradict social conventions, which is perfectly fine and entirely their (pun intended?) right, but it's not our responsibility to have to keep up.

If in context we know gender, then cool, if not, Jessica will be confused for a female.

James is more gender neutral than you think. (I can't speak for Jessica.)

It would be nice to replace the gendered pronouns with ones that separate along subject/object lines. Make "he" refer to the subject, and "she" refer to the object.

"Harper presented to Jessica and she was confused."

"Harper presented to James and she was confused."

"Harper presented to Sam and she was confused."

"Harper presented to Sam and he was confused."

"Harper presented to the board and they were confused."

I mean, no chance in hell making a switch like that by fiat. It just sounds so wrong. But if I were greenfielding a language, I think that would be a nice feature.

> It would be nice to replace the gendered pronouns with ones that separate along subject/object lines.

English has subject vs object distinctions in pronouns already, but all of your examples are subject and not object uses.

You seem to want a distinction between whether the referent was a subject or object in the preceding clause, but in all your examples the only reason to use a pronoun is to refer to the indirect object, since to refer to the subject you would render the sentence exactly as your example except dropping the pronoun entirely, so it doesn't seem to be a necessary or useful distinction, at least in the examples presented.

> You seem to want a distinction between whether the referent was a subject or object in the preceding clause

Yes.

> ...to refer to the subject you would render the sentence exactly as your example except dropping the pronoun entirely.

Oof. Of course. I seem to forget how to speak when I'm thinking too much about the rules.

The point is that where the antecedents differ in number, the semantic number of the pronoun may resolve an ambiguity.

If "they" can mean either singular or plural, then it doesn't help to resolve the ambiguity at all.

In my dialect of English, singular they works well for unspecified third persons, but very badly for specific ones.

What dialect of English is that?

> “She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes.”

I fall into category C: Native English speaker who has no idea how to use English properly. Could someone please explain what is supposedly wrong with this sentence?

I suppose for people opposed to the singular "they," the "correct" way to write this would be something like:

> “She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in one's clothes.”

or:

> “She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in his or her clothes.”

I don't get it. "their" in this sentence clearly refers to "everybody", which is plural.

The post goes into some detail about this. "Everybody" is semantically plural, but its verbs are conjugated as singular:

Everybody is, everybody has, everybody does, etc.

"everybody" refers to a group of people, but the word itself is singular and would typically use singular verb forms.

In day-to-day English, I've seen people use it both ways though.

Everybody is here. Everybody are here.

The former is the usual form and the latter sounds very odd to me.

Everybody and his dog vs Everybody and their dog sounds fine to me but for some people it sounds strange.

Weird. I guess this kinda reminds me of my revelation that "data" is plural, "data are" etc. It still sounds odd to me. But data == many datums (right?), so it technically makes sense. Everybody == many/all people, and yet is conjugated as singular? English is weird.

Now back to hacking javascript...

Using "data" as if it were plural sounds odd to most English speakers. Some people insist that because it is technically the plural of datum (in Latin anyway) it has to take plural verbs. But what is technically correct is meaningless compared to what sounds correct. What sounds normal compared to what sounds odd is the only thing that really determines if a usage is correct or incorrect (unless writing in a context that mandates following a specific style guide).

"Data is" sounds correct to most people so it is correct, Latin be damned.

I found that sentence mildly painful to parse because the relative clause that attaches to "everybody" is split by verb phrase "ought to do" (bit of a garden-path sentence). It would be much easier to read if it was "as everybody who falls into deep water in their clothes ought to do".

'Everybody' is singular, and 'their' is (generally) plural. One way to resolve that conflict would be to rewrite the second clause to say "...as one ought to do when one falls into deep water in one's clothes". Using 'one' isn't very common in North America in my experience.

"their" is used kind of like an indefinite pronoun. I guess you could use "one's" instead.

The article arguments against people who would say that "their" is incorrect, and "his" should be used instead

The first 3 paragraphs could've been skipped.

It really starts at: "I’ve wanted for some time to have one place to send everyone who complains about singular they".

https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html

Can somebody explain, what's wrong with `he' referring to a person of unknown sex? At least in German (er) and in Russian (он) masculine pronoun is still being used for that purpose.

Two reasons: first, it contributes to general presumptions of male-ness as the societal default and female-ness being out of place, and second, using either gender as the default in English just plain sounds weirder and more jarring than "they" in a variety of sentence constructions.

For the second factor, the example sentence presented first in the original article:

> She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes.

...sounds pretty jarring when you make it 'he'...

> She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in his clothes.

It just.. doesn't mean that in English. It doesn't sound right, like in the examples in this article.

Doesn't mean what? Generic he doesn't exist in English?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Generic_h...

It's out of fashion in a lot of places in English. I'm not saying it's gone entirely, but there are definitely places or communities where generic he would sound very awkward.

You know perfectly well what I meant. It is never genderless. The quote from the article makes that obvious: "At the funeral, everyone was dressed to the nines, each wearing his swankest tie or nicest dress." When it's used generically, it is still casting all the antecedents to males.

Stallman's article about singular they has always struck me as Stallman just reserving the right to be rude.

Pronouns are a lot like nicknames or shortened names. You can ask people to call you Richard instead of 'Richie', 'Rich', or 'Dick' and generally expect that people will try to respect that. If someone wrote and essay that said, "I object to using the nickname someone prefers, because I found an equally correct replacement of my choosing..." I think we'd all raise an eyebrow.

Sure, go ahead and reserve that right, but did you really need to?

It sounds weird. Using singular "they" instead sounds perfectly natural.

Yeah there's also the fact that it implies that male is the "default" which isn't ideal, but that's really secondary to the fact that using "he" for an unspecified person doesn't sound right and probably never has. If it had ever sounded right, people would have been using it naturally and grammar prescriptivists wouldn't have had to spend so much time complaining about singular "they".

>It sounds weird. Using singular "they" instead sounds perfectly natural.

Interesting, because for me it's the opposite, meybe because I'm used to German and Russian, but

> The patient should be informed of his therapeutic options.

Sounds sound, and

> The patient should be informed of their therapeutic options.

Sounds gravely wrong.

Has anyone been disputing the continued use of 'they' in referring to a person of unknown gender?

I was under the impression that the recent controversy surrounding the word is linked to the LGBTQ movement.

> I was under the impression that the recent controversy surrounding the word is linked to the LGBTQ movement.

Nobody I know in the LGBTQ community takes issue with "singular they". In fact, many of my close non-binary friends prefer they/them.

I think Liquix is referring to the inverse scenario, which is people outside the LGBTQ community refusing to use "they" to refer to someone who prefers they/them.

Not really. Prescriptivists have been fighting singular they since the Victorian era.

https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...

Although this essay is interesting and amusing (and a great rebuttal to many of the sillier objections to singular they), it does not address the main objection I hear (and the one that I find compelling enough to ask that people not use "they" for me):

I present to you as a singular entity. I find it disempowering to be addressed with a pronoun that might be understood as plural, as if you might address some of the needs of the multitudes within me but not others.

I very much prefer to be addressed with a different pronoun if I'm being addressed alone versus when I'm being addressed in a group.

Is that so weird?

Now, on the other hand, I think that gendered pronouns are downright idiotic.

So the pronoun that I've come to prefer is simply "it." I call many wonderful living things (think of an elderly redwood tree) "it" all the time, and it doesn't seem to bother the three nor anyone else.

If it's good enough for it, it's good enough for me.

"You" is grammatically plural as well, its singular form is/was "thou". But now everyone sees it as a valid pronoun to refer to a single person.

I always use y'all for second person plural.

Maybe one day, "y'all" will take the place of "you" as both singular and plural pronoun

Where once the singular was thee and thou forms, you and they developed singular use in parallel with each other hundreds of years ago.

For some reason, presumably connected with its use as non-gendered pronoun, there's only fuss made about they.

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