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> The question of what will become of the farm is a very complicated and painful one for Eleanor. They are an academic and a writer, and their family wants them to pursue their passions. Eleanor has no interest in farming themself, but they don’t want to see the farm disappear. They now live in New York State and miss home all the time. The family wants to hold on to the property, if at all possible, so they can live out their days here and leave it for Eleanor to do with it as they wish.

This is getting pretty old. Is it one person or several? Confusing readers just to be politically correct is not surprising coming from Smithsonian Magazine, but I just can't help rolling my eyes at this nonsense.

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>This is getting pretty old.

Well the singular use of "They" is actually pretty old [1]. I don't think it is confusing readers as they did mention a name.

> I just can't help rolling my eyes at this nonsense.

I get the frustration if you are not used to the usage of the pronoun in its singular form, but it is actually sensible

[1] https://www.scu.edu/media/offices/provost/writing-center/res...

> Well the singular use of "They" is actually pretty old

The cardinal rule of writing is Serve the Reader — Don't Make Him/Her Do Needless Work. In modern parlance, "they" is an unobjectionable shortcut when you don't know who the person is, but it's just confusing to readers when it's about a known person. I'd be fine with a coined, gender-neutral singular pronoun, analogous to how feminists coined "Ms." decades ago and it's now practically universal.

The OED reference is very vague. We're not even sure in what context "they" was used 600 years ago. Care to elaborate?

Are you referring to this reference?

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

What part is vague?

Because it's grasping at straws. A singular case of a poem referring to an unnamed person? They are trying to make it seem like this was likely common and accepted 700 years ago up until today. I really doubt the author considered gender identity. In fact, up until quite recently, the use of "they" as gender neutral would cause blank stares.

Why would it be necessary for the author to consider gender identity? I don’t follow the logic of your argument.

The cited example is just the oldest known example of singular “they”. You’ll find more examples. You’d have to rip a lot of pages out of your history books in order to come up with a timeline where singular “they” wasn’t natural English. All that is happening now is that “they” is being used more often to refer to specific, known people, which is not much of a stretch.

It's not a well-written paragraph because it deals with both Eleanor and the family and it's not immediately obvious what "they" is referring to in one or two spots.

That said, singular-they is pretty much the best alternative to dealing with a number of issues that copy editors have struggled with for years.

Why can't we just make a new pronoun that is "they" but singular?

Like "Theya".

Theya is my friend. It's singular, non gendered, and then we can just get rid of every pronoun except "they" and "theya".

Because it's much easier to get people to use an existing pronoun in a way that historically would have been considered a bit sloppy than it is to get them to adopt a new non-sex gendered but non-neutral coined pronoun. (It's actually been tried in the past.)

It worked pretty well with "Ms." back in the day. (I know, I know, it's not a pronoun.)

Honorifics are more of an “open class”…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_speech#Open_and_closed...

This really just a way of rephrasing what the parent comment says. By some reckonings, in English, pronouns are a closed class, and verbs are an open class. Some languages have it the other way around, where you can invent new pronouns but not new verbs (you have to take a noun X and say “do X” or something like that).

Ms. did have its own political angle but but when it did finally become mainstream in the late 60s/early 70s, I'm not sure that there were too many people ready to go to the mat for public honorifics that distinguished whether a woman--and only a woman--was married or not. (And at least some people who probably reflexively opposed the change at first, changed their mind later on.)

But honorifics are tricky and some people feel very strongly about them--e.g. Dr. for someone with a PhD.

It's easier to do what happened to "you" (also previously the plural), form entirely new plurals akin to "you all". "They all" reads pretty well to me and I'm personally very curious if "th'all" works as well as "y'all" and have been subtly experimenting with it to see who notices.

You couldn’t figure out it was singular after seeing “an academic and a writer” in reference to a single name? This doesn’t seem confusing at all.

Granted, I’ve seen some sentences that are more ambiguous. But most of the time, context makes it plainly obvious, as it does here. The benefit is that by using “they”, the writer is making fewer guesses or assumptions. So it’s a trade off - more ambiguity, fewer mistakes. I think it’s a win overall.

> This doesn’t seem confusing at all.

It was to me. Since I only read the quote I assumed "they" referred to Eleanor and Eleanor's partner or some other person that was mentioned before the quoted section.

While I like rms' suggestion of using person, per, and pers I can live with writers using singular they instead. It solves an issue English has (and many other languages also have) with lack of information.

These things only become familiar with continued usage. Give it time.

It may become familiar, but it is no less confusing. I had to read that paragraph several times to understand who “they” were.

Yeah, you have to give it time.

That said, the particular paragraph has some problems with antecedents. It could equally have those same problems if you were using other pronouns, like he, she, or it.

It would seem that if there was another word that was gender neutral and that people like to use instead of they would reduce the plural confusion reading problem. I realize that isn’t likely to happen but would solve the technical issue.

Sure. But it is equally possible to reword things to clarify. There are plenty of languages out there that never made the he/she/they distinction in the first place, and plenty of pro-drop languages where you would normally omit the subject of a sentence entirely, if you expect that the listener/reader can infer the subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language

It is hard to make the argument that singular “they” is somehow an inherently confusing construct, especially given how prevalent it is in English, and how prevalent it has been for centuries.

The wall has always said that two legs are better than four

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