The Search for a Universal Pronoun May Have Found Its Own Beginning
I have to say that it has bothered me for some time that people use “they” as a singular pronoun. But it has bothered me even more that it’s so easy to do.
My newest dictionary, The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Ed, (2005) says:
Sentences such as ask a friend if they could help are still criticized for being ungrammatical. Nevertheless, in view of the growing acceptance of they and its obvious practical advantages, they is used in this dictionary in many cases where he would have been used formerly.
–usage note at “They”
The widespread use of “they” in this fashion has bothered me partially because I have felt that a perfectly good construction (the use of he/him/his as a neuter case) has been abandoned in favor of a grammatically unsound construction, and partly because, paradoxically, in order to avoid the perception of a lack of gender neutrality while still remaining grammatically correct, we have been forced to become very gender-specific. Think about it: for zillions of years, English speakers knew that he/him/his didn’t mean male, and yet because of the perceptions of a vocal minority over a course of merely a couple of decades, we were all forced to start saying “he or she,” “s/he,” etc, which are all VERY gender-specific constructions! We were even expected, in extreme cases, to properly alternate the genders so as to not show any preference or bias.
(Ok, off-topic, but I have to stick this in here: March, 1978. Walking north on Railroad Avenue, Bellingham, Washington. Walking along behind two persons, one male and one female. Overheard (I swear to you I am not making this up. This is, to the best of my ability, a straight transcription):
Him: “So, there was this guy-”
Her: “Person.”
Him: “What?”
Her: “You said ‘guy.’ Say ‘person.’ Unnecessary gender reference is offensive.”
Him: (confused) “But — it was a man. The joke doesn’t work unless it’s a man.”
Her: “Then I don’t want to hear it. It’s not a joke, it’s part of the subjugation of females, and I don’t want to hear it.”
So “he/him/his” is a male-chauvinist sexist pig thing, right?
Well, no. Turns out it was basically invented by a feminist grammarian, Anne Fisher. Quoting from The New York Times, "On Language; All-Purpose Pronoun":
Paradoxically, the female grammarian who introduced this he business was a feminist if ever there was one. Anne Fisher (1719-78) was not only a woman of letters but also a prosperous entrepreneur. She ran a school for young ladies and operated a printing business and a newspaper in Newcastle with her husband, Thomas Slack. In short, she was the last person you would expect to suggest that he should apply to both sexes. But apparently she couldn’t get her mind around the idea of using they as a singular.
But here’s the best part (and something I really wish I’d known a long time ago):
What was the older way to refer to a genderless “anybody”? They. Quoting again, from the same source:
This will surprise a few purists, but for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine. Nobody seemed to mind that they, them and their were officially plural. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, writers were comfortable using they with an indefinite pronoun like everybody because it suggested a sexless plural.
So that’s it. I officially hereby adopt “they” as my new universal pronoun, and do solemnly swear to uphold its use as such before any and all challengers.
I received a very insightful and helpful comment to this blog post, but I received it as a series of tweets to my Twitter account, @LeviMontgomery. With the kind permission of the author of these tweets, Michele Saaem (@saaem), I have stitched them together into a whole, and I’m posting it here. Minor edits, mostly replacing dropped articles and other “Twitterisms,” I have made in situ as it were, while my one more substantive addition is marked by brackets.
“In Persian, no words to delineate ‘he’ or ‘she’; there is only ‘ouh’; this works perfectly well. However, because my husband tries to be correct in English, he uses ‘he’ & ‘she’ when telling of events, etc, but gets mixed up when he begins to speak rapidly so begins to use both. The effect is that that story can appear to contain twice as many people as there actually are, eg ‘he went to town and then she went to the shops’, or similar. So stories are both crowded & misleading. Conversely, George (husband) finds it extraordinary that English is ‘short of” words to describe different varieties of uncles/aunts, sister-in-law etc, as extended family relationships are so central [to his culture]. I suggested to him languages only develop words necessary in cultural context & needing to have an exact word for a second cousin’s wife is less useful to western society.”
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