Merriam-Webster declares ‘they’ its 2019 word of the year | Hacker News Reader

Merriam-Webster declares ‘they’ its 2019 word of the year

latimes.com

35 pointspseudolus84 comments

I envy the English grammar over this. In German the equivalent third person plural pronoun "sie" could absolutely not be used in singular context and would cause the predicate of the sentence to have to switch to plural too which doesn't work semantically.

So in German, I'm stuck with trying to evenly distribute female and male pronouns or writing the ugly equivalent to "he/she"

While it's possible in English and we do it a lot now, there was a lot of argument against it for a long time. It still sounds weird to me, but I've accepted the necessity.

Perhaps German should just do the same? Or invent a new neutral pronoun that doesn't break the rules.

I believe that singular "they" is fairly ancient in English, it's not really novel even though it's become a bit of a hot topic over the past couple of decades with the broader arguments over gender in society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage

When it comes to bringing the same grammatical features over other languages you have to keep in mind that English grammar is pretty un-gendered compared to German or Romance languages for instance. Maybe it would be possible for German to start using Sie in the singular if people try hard enough (after all they already do it for polite 2nd person, but that might actually make it more confusing instead of less) but that would be a dead end in Romance for instance since we have feminine and masculine "they" (and no neutral) so it wouldn't solve anything.

Beyond that in English grammatical gender is basically limited to pronouns, whereas in other languages adjectives, nouns and even sometimes verbs have to agree so the churn is much higher if you decide to tweak those rules. Some francophone people champion "l'écriture inclusive" for instance in order to solve this problem but the changes in grammar are much more invasive than merely s/<s?he>/they/.

> would cause the predicate of the sentence to have to switch to plural too which doesn't work semantically.

Not sure how English is different here. We do have to make somewhat awkward constructions using "they", and the predicate changes as well.

"She has to make sure her code passes tests before committing it" changes to "They have to make sure their code passes tests before committing it".

I hadn't actually thought of that you're right. We still treat they as plural from the perspective of the verb even if we're using it as a singular pronoun.

It really is sort of a hack to use an existing pronoun in a way that sounds least wrong to people.

All language is spaghetti code.

I really wish people would just invent a new word, rather than breaking our ability to distinguish singular vs plural.

they have invented many... that might be part of the problem

I wonder if, as a singular "they" becomes more common, we will begin seeing it treated as singular grammatically.

i.e. "They has to make sure their code passes tests before committing it"

It sounds weird after a lifetime of treating they as plural, but is a lot more clear. I have a friend who's S.O. prefers to be referred to as "they", and I constantly find myself confused whether we are talking about his S.O., or some group of people.

"They have" is already normal grammar for singular they. "Tell each programmer that they have to commit their code."

I find that hard to believe considering how ubiquitous singular-they is in virtually everyone's speech including yours.

What's bizarre to me is how many people suggest this is some new phenomenon lately when actually it comes so naturally to us that we don't even notice it. You've used and read singular-they probably daily in your life since you could read, yet now you've convinced yourself you're somehow only used to plural-they.

Your post history even shows that you use singular-they which is basically guaranteed for anyone with enough comments on the site: "I assume they [upstream HNer] are referring to Chrome on mobile."

It turns out that context makes this distinction so simple that we totally forget it's a non-issue.

No, we won’t. (Even if singular “they” becomes ubiquitous, which is by no means guaranteed).

You was once exclusively plural. It is now usually singular, but we still use plural verb forms with it (“you are”, etc.). Conversely with on in French, which was once exclusively singular but now means “we” in colloquial speech yet still takes singular verb forms (“on est français” = “we are French”. “il est français” = “he is French”.)

Wow, I never noticed that! I suppose it's rather naive to think that common use would evolve to follow rules, rather than the other way around.

German also has Sie playing the role of its formal "you," and the singular "she," in addition to meaning "they." I don't see why it's hard for it to pick up an additional responsibility.

In French we have a similar problem but sometimes you can work around it by using "la personne" (the person) and then use the feminine for the rest of the sentence. It's convenient were you're talking about an hypothetical people, of course it doesn't work if you're talking about a concrete person whose gender you want to obfuscate. Certainly there's something similar in German?

The historically "correct" way to do it in English was just to default to masculine unless the person in question was known to be a woman. (Or unless the person was in a role that you just assumed was a woman, like a secretary.)

Which is one of the problems. You're using the third person pronoun to make assumptions about genders for some role. (And beyond that, you're assuming binary gender identities.)

>The historically "correct" way to do it in English was just to default to masculine unless the person in question was known to be a woman.

I realize the implication of you putting "correct" between quotes but I want to point out that it really depends what time frame you have in mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage

The prescription that "he" be used as gender-neutral is, in the grand scheme of things, fairly recent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage

>The earliest known explicit recommendation by a grammarian to use the generic he rather than they in formal English is Ann Fisher's mid-18th century A New Grammar[...]

Meanwhile gender-neutral singular "they" has been used by some authors for much longer:

>"Eche on in þer craft ys wijs." ("Each one in their craft is wise.") — Wycliffe's Bible, Ecclus. 38.35 (1382)

By correct, in this context, I mostly meant English (especially American English) style guides and similar that were published over a number of decades prior to maybe ten years or so ago. I'm sure there are lots of individual examples that don't follow that timeline though.

After people started to become more generally sensitive to gender role assumptions and language that reinforced those assumptions, I can recall lots of examples of "he/she" constructions and/or writing examples in a way that you had both a male engineer and a female engineer.

The preference for using singular they in part because it doesn't still rely on binary pronouns is relatively recent in my personal experience--at least in formal writing.

Why don't you just use sie and not change anything else?

That doesn't really work in German as the pronoun "sie" changes meaning depending on context. It can mean "she": Sie ist kalt (she is cold). It can mean the plural "they": Sie sind kalt (they are cold). And it can be used for the formal "you": Kommen sie? (are you coming?)

But isn't that what we're talking about here? "They are cold" can be plural in English, but it can also reference a singular "they". The formal usage would just go away with use probably, or stay around totally on context.

Seems like "sie" would work just as well in German as in English.

Maybe they (the language) can use the historical “neuter” pronouns iz/sui, ës/iro, imu/im.

Most likely people will use singular sie and it will cease to be exclusively fem in singular.

This is not a mess in german, because it would not be "sie", it would actually be "Sie".

Edit: Typo

no. it would be "sie". Personal pronouns are not capitalized.

The only "Sie" in use is the second person singular in formal form (something else English doesn't have) when used to address a person directly.

Well, you are right about that, but this is the kind of thing I usually see done in things like job descriptions to avoid gendered third person and to sound more personal

"Sie können fließend Englisch sprechen und [...]"

Using "sie" to specify one person in german sounds a lot like "pluralis majestatis" to me. Which is sorta like (but not quite) the "royal we" in english

> Using "sie" to specify one person in german sounds a lot like "pluralis majestatis" to me."

no. we have that too, but it's the second person plural. Nobody uses this any more though because we killed our kings back in the early to mid 1800s :p

You don't have an impersonal pronoun?

The one thing about English that is a mess are our pronouns. In Italian you can just use "si" and be done with it. I then am not declaring me, you, s/he, we, they, one, ect. I'm explicitly not declaring the pronoun.

Spanish has that too, and I'm pretty sure French does too. The closest English has is "one" which doesn't really work as well.

We do. But "it" carries a strong implication of not only gender-neutral but inhuman. A lot of people won't even use "it" for a pet. And there's even a fairly strong tradition of actually using feminine pronouns for, e.g. ships.

Native Swahili speaker here and the language cares only if its a being or not a being and for beings, it simply doesn't care if its a man, a woman, a horse, a pig or an alien with ten sexes.

Its possible to speak naturally in Swahili without revealing the gender of the person being talked about and for this reason, i find the he/she/they in English to be very strange and limiting at times.

I always wonder what Meriam-Webster was like before Twitter. Did their social media manager shape the culture or did they highlight a culture that already existed? I would have imagined a dictionary publisher as a pretty stuffy place but they seem fairly progressive and were one of the first “personality” brands I remember seeing on Twitter.

I just ran into an interview between Twitter Business and Webster's Twitter person. You might find it interesting

https://media.twitter.com/en_us/articles/q-a/2019/talking-tw...

Apparently they Slack chat about linguistics.

"They" has been a valid singular pronoun in English since Chaucher; it's not a new invention.

No, it hasn't, not in a subjetive syntactical position, that's a fallacy.

Exactly! It was used in phrases like "To each their own." but never "I will go with Pat to their birthday party."

"But Chaucer!" is a half-truth.

An incorrect statement is not a fallacy. An incorrect statement can indicate a fallacy's presence, but in this case I don't believe it does.

The fallacy in this case is a strawman. They are saying that if singular they is acceptable in certain situations (e.g. this very sentence), it then becomes acceptable in any situation (e.g. "Their name is Charles.")

The reality is that singular-they in these new variations is not a linguistic phenomenon, it is instead a political shibboleth.

And yet it still grates on my ears every time someone uses it in the singular. But the same things happens when someone ends a sentence with a preposition or splits an infinitive, and neither are those consider grammatical faux pas anymore.

just because it grated on your ears does not make it bad grammar

Ending a sentence with a preposition and splitting an infinitive have never been against English grammar.

They were “considered” as faux pas by people who were wrong.

That is true, but ending sentences with prepositions still makes you sound like you don't know how to English. "Where are you at?" Just no. Why add the extra word that doesn't clarify anything? "Where are you going to?" Even writing it makes me cringe. Granted, if doing otherwise would make the sentence sound awkward, go for it. e.g. "Ending sentences with prepositions? That is something up with which I will not put!" I am such a pedantic nerd that I still write that way and try to find a way to make it sound less awkward.

> ending sentences with prepositions still makes you sound like you don't know how to English.

No it doesn’t. That’s just something people made up.

> Where are you at

Sounds fine to me, and I’m a native English speaker.

> Why add the extra word

Language is an organic system that evolves mostly randomly. We can’t and shouldn’t expect it to be logically consistent.

Every time? If a person never used it I think he or she might sound stilted, since he or she would need to alter his or her speech in order to avoid the pronoun he or she wanted to avoid.

To each his or her own I suppose :)

When I was in academia, it was considered acceptable for one to alternate between his and her when the gender of the subject is unknown. Using his or her every time does sound stilted, but proper grammar often sounds "weird". My highschool English teacher's favorite phrase was "things that 'sound right' are often wrong". That's the beauty of this fucked up language. I refuse to believe that masculine pronouns being the default gender neutral is some conspiracy by the patriarchy, but that's just me.

No. But it was something that editors and others would "fix" until recently because it wasn't considered correct formal English.

In part because it has historical roots though (and a 2nd person pronoun antecedent as well), singular they really is the best approach IMO. Everything else calls attention to itself or is otherwise non-ideal for some reason or another.

I'm an English professor who's been publishing since the mid-nineties or so, and I don't recall ever seeing publisher's guidelines that didn't insist on gender-neutral language when possible (I believe it's been in the MLA and Chicago guidelines for a long time as well).

I've also never had an editor object to my using "they" in this way (usually to avoid repetitious use of "he or she" or the rather clumsy -- to me, any way -- "he/she"). Sometimes I alternate, which is another strategy a lot of people use.

I take your point, though. I can well imagine that once upon a time editors regarded this as an unambiguous grammatical error. I wonder when they stopped, though? How recent is recent? I suspect the shift didn't happen all at once . . .

I couldn't tell you the timing. I would have said in the mid-90s, constructions like he/she or deliberately making sure to explicitly have both male and female personas for the purposes of examples in tech writing were still pretty common.

For what it's worth, Chicago still seems to be somewhat on the fence about it: http://cmosshoptalk.com/2017/04/03/chicago-style-for-the-sin...

yes, i find it surprising that people are surprised at this as "they" is actually currently in use in singular form too

They cited significant YOY% increase in search interest so I guess it makes sense as a pick. I kind of like that they picked such a 'normal' word, IIRC they usually pick some new slang that entered the vernacular.

Most of the top words were normal non slang words although some were cant like qui pro quo, impeach. Yet there were normal words like crawdads, clemency, egregious. The only kinda slang one was snitty.

As is 'thou'

"Thou" is still used in some dialects of northern England and Scotland, albeit mostly by older people.

I’ve always liked pronouns like “they” because it never made sense to me (when growing up and learning “proper grammar”) why our only singular pronouns must be gendered. It seems better for everyone to focus on the substance of the sentence without anyone having to think about gender at all, unless it’s explicitly relevant to the sentence (and it’s usually not).

That said, I wish we actually had an explicitly singular version everyone agreed upon. Since “they” is usually thought of as plural by default (at least without context), it can be confusingly ambiguous to use when referencing sets of people in both singular and plural.

Perhaps we should recycle old words like “thee” ;) (mostly joking, but it would be kind of cool).

In an ideal world, we'd probably have a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun. Meanwhile, in the real world, that's such a political minefield that anything is going to get a lot of people up in arms and call all sorts of attention to itself. And just using "they" works pretty well in the vast majority of cases.

we'd probably have a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun.

Is not "it" the third person singular? Although that does carry its own overtones.

It is not a great one to use for humans, unless you want to imply less than human status.

Well yes, I did say that.

As you say, "it" carries its own overtones especially in non-binary sexual identity contexts where singular they is clearly relevant. "It" isn't really gender-neutral so much as it's explicitly non-gendered/not human. (I mean, you'll get people who object to those who would call their pet it.)

The actual reason is that language evolves organically and randomly, and so there's no a priori reason to expect any of it to “make sense”.

Though "organically" falls perpendicular to "randomly" as we've made sense of much of what has arisen over the long term in the actual organic world right?

In the same way many (perhaps reading Douglas Adams' puddle analogy) sided with evolution over creationist fervor, I think eventually many will begin to sympathize with the minority of thinkers who have "made sense" of why it was so important for pre-21st-century speakers to know the sex of everyone in a discussion, over an explanation that might be more incentivized...

Yes, there is sometimes an internal logic in the sense that it’s possible to find reasons for why language evolved in one way or another. (Historical linguistics is a field!) But that doesn’t have to follow any criteria that we might care about, like consistency or expressiveness.

To stretch your biology analogy even further: sort of like how humans have an appendix.

I wouldn’t try to read anything into culture based on the specific set of pronouns any language has. Turkish and (spoken) Chinese have never distinguished between “she” and “he” and it’s not because knowing someone’s sex is less important in their cultures than it is in Indo-European ones; it’s just random chance.

I see where you're coming from but that doesn't really refute the idea for me... Some cultures didn't develop footbinding, but that doesn't disqualify footbinding as what it is.

And even if they arose purely for convenience, why did they stick around? If today's populations really developed the self-reflection to operate critical of importance of sex, why are "he/his" not as weird to say as "whitey/whitey's" would be as pronouns?

You can't easily gender plural pronouns because the people/things they refer to could be a mixed group.

Gendering singlur pronouns is one way to avoid ambiguity.

Take these sentences:

I met a boy and a girl. They gave me a toy.

If it said "he" or "she" gave me the toy, you would know who specifically gave me the toy. The fact it says "they" likely means they acted together to give me th toy (otherwise I'd have said "he" or "she").

You could dump gendered pronouns and make everyone "they". But then you lose information. Who gave me the toy?.

You could dump pronouns all together, but then you would have to specifically name all the people/groups and use their full names all the time. That's long and complex.

Both pronouns, and semi-specific pronouns (gendered or plural/singular or cased ones or any combo of those) let you push more information in less time. They're a hack, but a very useful one.

Any misunderstanding can be improved with better communication skills, which everyone can stand to improve

Not quite.

It was used as a singular pronoun when the subject wasn't specific.

"To each their own."

But never when talking about a specific person, even in Chaucer's time

"Who will go with Linda to their birthday party?" which is hard for many native English speakers to understand.

Edit: Changed example to an unambiguously gendered name

Yup. The examples cited (at least a few years ago) all show a reference to a person from a group, never to a known individual. And it has never been common, except in fossilized expressions.

BTW, "Chaucer used it, so there" is pretty normative for a linguistic argument.

I agree. It's one thing to advocate for change to a language. Like the introduction of "Ms."

It's another to lie to justify your argument.

This is wrong. A specific person of unknown gender was always they. “That person, right there: they are trespassing!”

It wasn't "always they." It's perhaps been more common in informal speech than formal writing until recently. But traditional usage would have been to use he if gender was unknown (unless it were assumed it was a woman for some reason).

Your example doesn't sound as bullet-proof to me as you think it does. Especially if you're using Pat to suggest that we don't know their gender.

I just looked at my messenger chat history for "they" and "their" and found all sorts of examples of where we use "their" in your example, like committing to "their repository" which sounds more natural in some cases when you're just talking about pseudonyms or when something is said so in-passing that you don't even bother to pin down a gender. These come so naturally that you don't even realize it, just like you aren't examining my use of singular-they in this comment.

I'd suggest something else: We vastly underestimate how often we use the singular "they/their". I've seen HNers rant against the use of the singular they only to find usage examples in their own post history from just a day before.

I don't underestimate it. I'm not a native English speaker and my native language has gendered nouns, verbs, and adjectives (and numbered adjectives).

Aren’t there times when it’s not really possible to use a non-gender pronoun? e.g. Brian went to put a book on a shelf, but as they did the book fell out of their hands.

Well, what gender pronouns refer to seems to be changing from an objective measure of one's physical sex, to a subjective matter of one's preferred identity. This came about because there is a not-insignificant portion of individuals who refute gender roles society imposes on them with dubious legitimacy. So if "Brian" here said "they" preferred "they/them" pronouns, the usage would be correct. "Correctness" in this case then becomes what the individual person asked you to refer to them as. If they never asked you to refer to them a certain way, then the default assumption becomes the previous usage - a descriptor of a purely physical attribute.

If anything this issue is a succinct summary of how language encompasses worldviews and moralities. The reason this is so controversial, is partly because the imposition of the gender roles mentioned above doesn't just come out of nowhere, and this usage of language undermines their impositions.

This sentence reads fine to me? Especially if Brian is a non-binary person, but even if they are not I don't have any trouble reading this?

More interesting is that "impeach" came runner up...

I do like they as a singular pronoun. But I'm most intrigued by the word "snitty." And its etymology is what excites me the most about this word. I really like words that are recent but still have mysterious origins. OK is another one of my favorites.

Finally, we are retiring the "he" and "she" pronouns, words that arose over centuries within male-dominated cultural, literary, academic and religious landscapes helping to imbue physical sex with brutal economic purpose. We're ready to all be "they" because the primary identities of today are humans (neighbors, workers, believers) and we're ready to retire gender roles and move on to treat sexual dimorphism as something only a peg more significant to someone's sense of self than handedness!

...right? That must be in the article somewhere, I might have skipped over a few sentences.

I wonder why a LA times article has been linked, when Merriam-Webster's own website has a whole section dedicated to this subject[0]?

Blah.

[0](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-ye...)

As a non native speaker I find it difficult sometimes to parse who/what exactly is/are the subject of a phrase because of the use of the same pronoun on singular and plural forms. This already happened with “you” and I’m having a hard time to believe it’s a good idea to use they as a neutral singular rather than a new word just for that.

Is there any historical reason to use it like this?

For what it's worth, the formal language is “worse” than the colloquial one in one way: you being plural is only a thing in standard writing, at least in my dialect of English. I basically never use plural you and systematically use you guys (pronounced quickly, as one word), which has become the plural second-person pronoun in at least some dialects of English.

>you guys

You'll find those who will object to this in a mixed gender setting. Things like y'all and you folks are probably preferred in at least some contexts. (Having said that, I still reflexively use you guys a lot and I know lots of other people, including many women, who do as well.)

People can dislike it if they want. It’s my native language and I don’t intend to change it to accommodate other people’s tastes.

It's been historically used this way for hundreds of years. If I recall correctly, Shakespeare used singular they in some places. Just like "you", context clues are usually sufficient to disambiguate.

> It's been historically used this way for hundreds of years.

It's been historically used _occasionally_. Sure neither King James' Bible nor Shakespeare's plays abound in singular they; but there are occasional examples of it in both.

“Ye” used to be plural and “thou” singular. At some point, it became common to refer to royalty in the plural, even if you were addressing a single person (e.g., the king). As time went on, this practice was generalized so that you would refer to anyone in a socially superior position relative to you in the plural.

The effect of this eventually was that referring to someone with “thou” carried the implication that you viewed them as having lower social status than yourself. Once “thou” became risky to use due to the potential to cause offense, it rapidly fell out of common usage and “ye” and “you” took over (eventually just “you”), thus causing English to lose the plural form altogether. Now we have colloquialisms like “y’all” or “y’ins” or “you guys” or “you all” to make up for this.

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