The Lack of Context Should Protect Me

Look, nimrod, your Annual Meeting cannot, by definition, be "an unprecedented event."

And if you're a group of smart people, you know that already, and have no excuses.

Another Blast in My Futile War Against the Singular They

When you allow "they" to be a singular impersonal pronoun, you end up with sentences like this:

Somewhere in the male psyche is a little voice that tells them that if they see a female online, they obviously want to see their penis.

"Their penis"? Please, stop the madness. And "they obviously want to see their"? Shoot me now.

Let me fix that for you:

Somewhere in a man's psyche is a little voice that tells him that if he sees a female online, she obviously wants to see his penis.

See? Singular. Clear. Precise.

(Yes, I know it's futile -- see how I even put that word in the title? -- but I will always insist on retaining the right to complain.)

On the other hand, the comic is funny...and sadly true.

A Question to Pronoun Users

Do you really see no difference in these two uses of the word "they"?

a) I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. -- Jane Austen

b) I waved to the man and they waved back at me.

(Emphasis added for clarity.)

Because all of the people arguing "it was good enough for Jane Austen!" are trying to justify sentences like the latter -- which I expect Miss Austen would loathe, with a quiet, time-appropriate, womanly loathing -- on the basis of sentences like the former.

Do you honestly think that "they" is is in common use as the definite neuter singular third-person pronoun? Are there style guides or dictionary usage notes to support such a thing? (Is it allowed in Chicago or AP style?)

Has no one on the Internet ever heard of the "if it's clumsy, rewrite it" rule? I despair for the world.

They Are Not Singular

I was going to post the below as a comment on this post of Matthew Cheney's, but it's gotten too long and too grumpy for that. So it goes here...and you folks get to deal with my grumpy old-fashioned ire.

"They" is used, and understood, by the vast majority of English speakers to be third person plural, and making that word less useful and distinctive does not seem to me to be a worthy goal. Many writers have used individual words idiosyncratically, or in a non-standard manner, but that doesn't mean that all of the things a word has ever been thought to mean in the past are equally valid as meanings today.

I also note many of the usages noted by Cheney or on the linked page are of the form "everyone...they" or "anyone...they." Those may be technically singular, but "any" and "every" always retain a sense of multitudes to them.

There are many good ways to communicate that a singular third-person has an unknown (or unimportant) gender; making a myriad of other sentences less intelligible along the way is not one of them.

In the current case: "I'll pay one author for one story."

Join the Campaign to Keep They Plural!