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Comment by razakel | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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

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...

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.

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).

As is 'thou'

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

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

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.

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