For the sake of being politically correct, many writers have turned to being grammatically incorrect. “A child” does not do “their” homework. “A child” does “his” homework. Even if “he” turns out to be (unknown to the writer) a girl.
See, we have singular neuter pronouns in English. They (plural!) just happen to be the same as the singular masculine pronouns. Perhaps the men should be up in arms because they (plural!) don’t have a pronoun especially dedicated to them. After all, “he” and “him” and “his” are pronouns which can apply to all of humanity. They (plural!) have to do double-duty for the guys.
[Tweet “We HAVE singular neuter pronouns in English. They just happen to be the same as the singular masculine pronouns. #t2hmkr”]
Meanwhile, we girls have our own special pronouns – “she” and “her” and “hers.” Or maybe we could all find something more worthwhile to make a stink about than the “gender equality” of our words. (Whatever would we do if we were Spanish speakers? Heaven forbid that a table should be “feminine,” while a hammer is “masculine”!)
[Oops. Edited to remove my own grammatical error. I guess I should proofread better.]
If it’s good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for me.
In all seriousness, the singular they has been around in English for hundreds of years — longer than the modern notion of political correctness. While many grammarians may frown on it because it seems illogical to them, it’s as much a part of the English language as the split infinitive or ending with a sentence with a preposition (also frowned upon for silly reasons, in my humble opinion). Personally, I embrace the singular they.
Really? Seriously, that puts the argument in a whole different light for me. Classic, but infrequently used, English is a whole different animal than modern, let’s-make-it-up-because-we’re-offended-over-everything slangy English, in my opinion. (I don’t have an issue with a preposition at the end of a sentence, either. 😉 )
I don’t recall having ever heard ‘they’ used in the singular, though, apart from modern books, articles, etc. I don’t disbelieve you, but I’m not sure where to look; can you provide me with a quote and/or a more specific reference? Thanks!
No problem! It’s nice to meet someone who’s open to a new perspective.
I studied linguistics quite a bit in college, and found it to be very enlightening because there’s a lot of differences between what is taught prescriptively by grammarians and what’s taught descriptively by linguists. While I still believe that it’s important to “proper” English for the purpose of giving the impression of being educated, I’ve become a lot more tolerant of so-called “mistakes” because they often have a rich history. And once you learn about who the influential grammarians are/were, it’s a lot easier to question their pronouncements as easily as the hot/not lists in fashion magazines.
By the way, sentence final prepositions (aka preposition stranding) get a bad rap because they don’t occur in Latin — where in fact we get the word preposition (i.e. put before). Likewise, Latin verbs in the infinitive aren’t and can’t be split because those verbs are indicated by a special ending (e.g. ama-re, “to love”), whereas we indicate infinitives with the separate word “to”. Therefore we can say, “To boldly go”, whereas Caesar would have to say “to go boldly”. Both constructions have been part of English for a long, long time, but grammarians have long had a love affair with Latin and have tried to make English act more like what they see as a more logical language. As much as I love Latin, I can’t see anything particular logical about it once you get past Latin 101 — but that’s the same with any language I know of ; )
Anyhow, there I ramble on. You can probably tell that I love linguistics ; )
Here’s a good place to start looking into the subject at hand:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Thank you so much, this was very interesting. I was actually born in Madrid ( not telling you what year though!) but moved around europe and lastly settled in England when I was a teenager. I dont remember much of the few years I was in spain, but the smell of spanish food always seems to ring a bell in me or something. Funny, how I dont remember anything except the smells,isn’t it! I even found a whole internet site dedicated to spanish recipes, which gave me great delight and thought I really should to share with your readers. Anyway, thank you again. I’ll get my husband to add your website to my rss thing…