A commenter writes:
Well it could be worse. I hazard that in 50 years the sex sensitivities of the colloquial speaker will have caused the formal replacement of the generic singular pronoun (he) with the plural pronoun (they), which is safely without gender. Already constructions like these are ubiquitous among high-school age writers, and sanctioned by their teachers:Everyone must choose their own path.
Each student selects their thesis topic.
Note in the second example the jarring (I hope!) juxtaposition of the singular verb with the plural pronoun. This is the future.
Buddy, you don’t know the half of it! Not only are high-school age writers being taught this by teachers, they are even taught this by some other writers (who must obviously be misguided hacks, given how badly they’re abusing the English language). Some examples from some of these awful people — to avoid unduly embarrassing them, we’ll call them William S., Jane A., W.H. A., Jonathan S., William Makepeace T.,
And every one to rest themselves betakeI would have everybody marry if they can do it properly
... it is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy
Who makes you their confidant?
... every fool can do as they’re bid
A person can’t help their birth
There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend
(All sources are from the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, where the full names of these miscreants are revealed.) [UPDATE: A more comprehensive survey of Jane A.‘s works is in the Spurious Grammatic “Rules” of Every Sort Are My Abhorrence post.]
So, commenters, is it that all these writers (whose work ranges from the late 1500s to the 1900s) and many more were wrong, and you’re right, when you say that “their” can’t be used in these contexts? Is it that you have the Logic of the Language on your side — the same logic that tolerates the singular “you are,” “aren’t I?,” “ice cream,” and much more, but that as a matter of the laws of logic balks at a singular “they”? Or is it just that you’re discussing what you find aesthetically pleasing (or even pedagogically optimal, for instance with an eye towards teaching students usage that will satisfy self-described “purists” and will thus serve them well socially)? If it’s the latter, I’ll happily end the debate. But my sense is that many people who denounce the singular “they” (including where the singular relates to nouns with a collective meaning, such as “everyone”) and similar matters are making an assertion about correctness, and not just about their own tastes or about the most useful teaching approaches.
bearing says:
Clarity first, elegance (including conciseness) next, logical construction after that, adherence to standard grammatical rules behind those: those are my priorities of style. They are the same whether I am writing personal correspondence, blog posts, or scientific papers.
Often these priorities align, or support each other. Sometimes they are at odds. And then a choice must be made.
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November 19, 2009, 10:00 amPatHMV says:
Everybody, repeat after me: English is NOT Latin. Heck, even Latin is not always as purely logical as some of these purists seem to think language should be.
Now I must leave, to boldly go back to work.
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November 19, 2009, 10:04 ambearing says:
But I should add that I’m a big believer in teaching children (and anyone who’s just learning to write in English) slavish adherence to grammatical rules. Two reasons:
(1) so they learn them
(2) it is more difficult to teach logical construction than adherence to rules, and it is more difficult to teach clarity and elegance than logical construction
(3) clarity and elegance are marks of personal style which develop gradually as the writer grows comfortable with expressive language and as the reader is exposed to wider varieties of style and types of expression
(4) you get more “leeway” to break the rules, the better a writer you are.
All these are pedagogical considerations, though, and not constraints to place on the mature and capable writer.
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November 19, 2009, 10:09 amArthurKirkland says:
Perhaps it is time that myself abandoned zealous prescriptionism and, instead, anxiously embraced the significant improvements commenters have (or has) identified.
To demonstrate my commitment to new-found freedom of usage, I might promote a campaign to make “tortoise interference” common enough to qualify as accepted usage. Some legal persnicketers might object, but many “ordinary, regular” people might not only dismiss the objections of those gasbags but indeed enjoy pricking their prescriptivist balloons.
I don’t expect “tortiose interference” to become adequately popular overnight, but sometimes slow and steady wins the race.
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November 19, 2009, 10:14 amkumquat says:
I suspect the singular “they” ran afoul of the same people who decided double negatives were wrong. Historically, speakers of English could use multiple negatives for emphasis — for example, “I didn’t see nobody” as a stronger denial than “I didn’t see anybody”. And then pedants decided English needed to be like math, where adding two negatives makes a positive.
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November 19, 2009, 10:14 amDavid McCourt says:
EV, The list of illustrious “offenders” is less impressive than it first appears, for two reasons.
1) To add Horace to the name dropping: “Even Homer nods.” Even great writers commit infelicities on occasion. If you are telling me that Jane Austen did this all the time, that would be meaningful.
2) Some of the instances, Austen’s and Thackeray’s, for example, appear to be in dialogue. Perhaps they all appear in dialogue — you would have to tell me, as they are your examples — in which case, they are of no value to your argument, and indicate only that speakers of the time, in whatever walk of life the character is in, spoke like that.
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November 19, 2009, 10:29 amMatthew X. Economou says:
I think it’s pretty obvious that “they” is getting overloaded in exactly the same way as “you”: in some contexts, they both function as singular pronouns and in others as plural pronouns, with some semantic ambiguity as an unfortunate side effect.
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November 19, 2009, 10:30 amCrust says:
I think the argument against allowing double-negatives as intensifiers is that it can be confusing. Would “I’m not uncomfortable” mean I’m very uncomfortable or (as it does today) I’m at least somewhat comfortable? And it’s not like we lack unambiguous intensifiers (“very”, “extremely”, etc.)
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November 19, 2009, 10:34 amBruce McCullough says:
To demonstrate the legitimacy of the “singular-plural” construction, Eugene gives examples from the late 1500s to the 1900s. But is this not a case of the exception proving the rule? (Eugene should now plumb the depths of THAT oft-misused phrase....) :)
And forgive me please, for beginning the previous sentence with a preposition and the present sentence with “and”. (Do I have to apologize for placing the period outside the quote in the last sentence?)
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November 19, 2009, 10:35 amDavid McCourt says:
Strunk has some sensible words:
A common inaccuracy is the use of the plural pronoun when the antecedent is a distributive expression such as each, each one, everybody, every one, many a man, which, though implying more than one person, requires the pronoun to be in the singular. Similar to this, but with even less justification, is the use of the plural pronoun with the antecedent anybody, any one, somebody, some one, the intention being either to avoid the awkward “he or she,” or to avoid committing oneself to either. Some bashful speakers even say, “A friend of mine told me that they, etc.”
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November 19, 2009, 10:35 amerp says:
The problem will resolve itself. Pretty soon most people reading a post like this one won’t know what on earth it’s all about.
In olden days, the male pronoun was used when the sex of the person in question was unknown. Now that’s no-no, so I either try to rewrite the sentence in the plural or use the inelegant his/her or he/she.
One of the wonderful things about early English novels is the formal writing and if a rare grammatical error got past the editors, the elegance of the prose more than makes up for it.
__________________
o/t — EV, does the note at the bottom of posts mean that one can no longer link to the VC?
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November 19, 2009, 10:36 amCrust says:
Exactly. Though in the case of “they” there is an upside to weigh against the unfortunate ambiguity (avoiding awkward “he or she” constructions or questionable implicit assumptions about gender). It’s way too late to go back to “thou” for the singular second person, but that (IIRC eighteenth century) transition introduced ambiguity for no benefit that I can see.
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November 19, 2009, 10:39 amEugene Volokh says:
ArthurKirkland: I share your doubts that your campaign will prevail. But in any event, what does it have to do with the matter mentioned in my post — a usage that has for centuries been common and accepted by some of the most noted writers in the English language, but that some commentators condemn?
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November 19, 2009, 10:41 amkumquat says:
It’s usually clear from context which the speaker means. Statements like “I didn’t see nobody” and “I ain’t done nothing” are rarely if ever confusing to police and other authority figures (whether they’re believable is another matter). Your “I’m not uncomfortable” example, if it could be interpreted either way, would be made clear by the speaker’s tone of voice.
Threads like these always remind me of Samuel Johnson’s stated reason for writing the first English dictionary: to prevent the further degeneration of the language.
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November 19, 2009, 10:45 amRaghav says:
David McCourt:
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austhlis.html
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November 19, 2009, 10:49 amDavid McCourt says:
“In olden days, the male pronoun was used when the sex of the person in question was unknown. Now that’s no-no . . . .”
Mainly in academia, where professors, whatever their politics, seemed cowed, with some even going around using “she” as the default pronoun, lest they be hissed at by the Madame Defarges in the lecture hall.
Elsewhere, those of us without Stockholm Syndrome continue to use “he.”
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November 19, 2009, 10:50 amCrust says:
kumquat: As you say it’s usually clear from context whether a double negative is intended as an intensifier. But not always. Why muddy up the language with more ambiguity for no benefit (at least that I can see)? I think any trend towards allowing double negatives as intensifiers should be resisted. On the other hand, if a distinctive second person plural pronoun started to gain traction (e.g. “youse”) I’d very happily join in. I’m a prescriptivist; YMMV.
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November 19, 2009, 11:14 amOren says:
Can you give an example of a sentence that is semantically ambiguous because of this usage?
FIFY. Seems you have no shortage of terrors for which you must apologize. :-)
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November 19, 2009, 11:49 amDavid McCourt says:
Raghav,
Interesting site, and definitely shows that Austen’s usage quoted by EV wasn’t a unique event, but.... I would note that many more instances occur in dialogue than in narration, and of those in narration, many occur during Austen’s frequent resort to free indirect speech — that is, when the narrator’s voice abandons its cool neutrality, and adopts the voice of the person whose thoughts or actions are being narrated, as if the narrator were doing an impersonation of that character. By contrast, only three examples exist of this usage among Austen’s letters, when she had resort to her own voice.
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November 19, 2009, 12:02 pmbillo says:
To me, the issue is simply which form provides the most exact, specific information. Using the term “they” as both singlular and plural decreases the information content of the sentence. Instead, it requires that one infer the information from the context; that information may not be obvious. I understand that clarity is often not the goal in legal or political writing, but decreasing clarity should not be the *goal.*
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November 19, 2009, 1:27 pmPubliusFL says:
Yep, “thou” is dead for second person singular. So disambiguate on the other side by using “y’all” for the plural. (In my non-Southron opinion, “y’all” comes across as less jarringly regional than alternatives like “youse.”)
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November 19, 2009, 1:28 pmcorneille1640 says:
To answer Mr. Volokh’s question, and speaking only for myself:
1. As a pedagogical manner, I say it’s important to teach students to try to satisfy the self-described purists.
2. Aesthetically, I prefer to keep “everybody” singular. I have, for some reason, an adversion to plurals. I try to avoid them whenever possible. They just seem sloppy to me. (Of course, by my count, I have just used them six times, including this sentence.)
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November 19, 2009, 1:35 pmJeff R. says:
One obstacle to accepting a singular they is the lack of a proper reflexive form. (The idea of the doubly-plural “themselves” as being singular is unacceptably jarring.) So proponents should adopt and use “themself” until it gets promoted by use from non-word status through nonstandardness to accepted usage...
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November 19, 2009, 1:42 pmBruce Hayden says:
Normally, I abhor modernizations of our version of the English language. BUT, I am even more unhappy with the use of the singular pronoun. You have some writers alternating “he” and “she”. You have others inserting “she” when the context would imply that a male is far more likely. On occasion, I have used the even worse “s/he” just so that I wouldn’t have to play that game (but that fails miserably with the possessive).
Given the choice of expanding “they” or abusing “he”/“she”, I would pick the former. It somehow isn’t nearly as jarring to me. And, I think ditto for “their” instead of “his”/“her”, esp. when it is obvious what game the author is playing with his/her choice (I originally put in “their” instead of “his/her”, and probably would have in any other situation than this blog).
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November 19, 2009, 1:44 pmCrunchy Frog says:
Please. Everyone knows that the proper second person plural formation is youse guys.
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November 19, 2009, 1:51 pmEugene Volokh says:
Bruce Hayden: My point is that it’s too late to “expand” “they” to include the singular. It has been broad enough for centuries.
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November 19, 2009, 1:54 pmShelbyC says:
Look, she who holds the ruler makes the rules. That’s how it is.
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November 19, 2009, 2:05 pmYankev says:
When can I safely emulate Lucky Jack Aubrey by saying “Ain’t I”?
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November 19, 2009, 2:30 pmHey says:
In French, “Ils” specifically means groups comprising men and women as well as men only groups. English is less structured (nous nous manques L’Academie de la Langue Anglaise) and more cowed by the PC Taliban.
It has always struck me as a far worse atrocity to use “s/he” or random alternation of “he” and “she” than to use “them”. I’d be fine with using “he” if the linguistic scolds would join me on the barricades against the feminazis. Alas it’s a lonely battle so so the third person plural/singular reigns.
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November 19, 2009, 2:35 pmPubliusFL says:
Fiddlesticks! Advantages of “y’all” over “youse guys”:
1. “Y’all” is less regional (thanks partly to the spread of “y’all” from the South to urban areas across the country via African American Vernacular English).
2. “Y’all” is shorter and faster. One syllable beats two, and the liquid sounds at each end of “y’all” facilitate smooth flow of speech.
3. “Youse guys” is redundant, as each element is plural in itself.
4. The “guys” in “youse guys” has the same non-gender-neutral problem that makes resistance to singular “they” futile.
5. “Y’all” can be dressed up by expanding it to “you all.” But there’s no way to say “youse guys” without sounding like a cabbie or a cheesesteak vendor. ;-)
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November 19, 2009, 3:34 pmsiskiyou says:
Rower (oarsman), councilmember (actually, an ok, if less informative alternative), chair (fer chrisssake), lettercarrier, firefighter, gay, and so forth. What is troubling is to be told how to speak and write, hence how to think, by those who are not at all concerned with language except as a political weapon.
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November 19, 2009, 3:41 pmTracy W says:
David McCourt — can you name some pre-20th century illustrious writers who in their published work (including published letters) never followed “every body” by a “them”?
The pre-20th century requirement is because I think there is a serious possibility that editors could have become more anal about the rule once it started getting taught as a strict one.
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November 19, 2009, 3:57 pmStormy Dragon says:
Not all of us have Stockholm Syndrome. Some of us just realize there are people who insist on using ‘he’ purely to cause annoyance and are retaliating by using ‘they’ purely to annoy them back.
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November 19, 2009, 4:12 pmThe Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Spurious Grammatic “Rules” of Every Sort Are My Abhorrence says:
[...] today, I posted quotes from prominent authors who use “them” with formally singular terms such as “everyone.” A [...]
Houston Lawyer says:
I always use masculine pronouns unless the context clearly requires otherwise.
I take great pleasure in changing “chairperson” to “chairman” and I have no qualms about removing “he, she or it” since that phrase reduces the flow of any sentence.
I also eschew using they as a singular, which is as jarring as using yall that way.
The term African-American has never crossed my lips, so I don’t get all tied up in how to describe a Black Canadian.
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November 19, 2009, 4:43 pmTo Have and Have Not says:
Well, now that we’re all properly neutered, it will be fine to write things like: The doctor was examining their patient. (Whose patient? Why the doctor’s, of course.)
The district judge admonished their law clerk to have their bench memo done by the end of the week.
Because Professor Volokh is posting so much today, I hope they are not short-changing their students. Their students may feel slighted because they are posting on this subject.
Think these are clunky and confusing??? Seems to me that these examples are no worse than the ones being defended as Shakespearean.
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November 19, 2009, 4:52 pmTriangle Man says:
“She or he” is inelegant. I know academics who alternate “she” and “he”, but I find that disconcerting. Others have proposed “hu” as a new pronoun for English. I can’t get into it. I have seen some academics, especially when describing contemptible behavior by a student, write “s/h/it”, but that would screw up URLs. I could get used to using “they”, and it reasonably close to the archaic “thou” proposed above.
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November 19, 2009, 5:08 pmTaxLawyer says:
I don’t necessarily disagree with EV’s larger point — that not all “violations” of “rules” are or should be capital offenses.
But EV’s argument in these two posts, while amusing, is an argument from authority, and proves nothing.
That a particular usage can be found in the writings of Austen, Thackeray, et al. might prove only:
1. That the particular usage was standard at the time of the writing — which does not, in and of itself, render the usage standard today; or
2. That the usage, while not standard even contemporaneously, was no great flaw in the hands of writers of that caliber.
The modern usage that prompted EV’s post is yet, of a different order entirely. It is become common through obvious lack of knowledge of rules (or “standard usage”). No doubt the high school papers complained of exhibited not only the singular use of “they” (arguably common enough to be considered standard), but also the misspelling of the possessive pronoun “its” as the contraction “it’s”; the formation of plurals by the additions of “‘s” to the singular.
I won’t put words in his mouth, but I’m guessing even EV would consider those latter two examples as incorrect. If so, then, it seems to me, we can’t let the high school students off on the singular “they”. It’s not a conscious choice made by a master wordsmith whose ear is true, but a careles and unschooled effort to express oneself in writing.
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November 19, 2009, 5:25 pmOren says:
(6) It can be expanded to “all y’all” to refer to an even larger group.
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November 19, 2009, 5:41 pmPiglet says:
I thought the definitive treatment of this issue was given by the Language Log blog, which cited numerous instances of singular “they” from the King James Bible and coined the delightful catch-phrase “Singular They: God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” lol
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003572.html
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November 19, 2009, 5:41 pmTo Have and Have Not says:
As long as we’re swapping arguments from authority, I shall weigh in with the following, from one of the better judicial writers I’ve encountered:
“Do not allow yourself to be browbeaten by the feminists into writing barbarisms such as ‘Each of us should paddle their own canoe.’” Thomas Gibbs Gee, A Few of Wisdom’s Idiosyncrasies and a Few of Ignorance’s: A Judicial Style Sheet, 1 Scribes J. Legal Writing 55, 60 (1990).
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November 19, 2009, 6:04 pmOren says:
Or it might prove that our best wordsmiths have always felt free to buck the “authority” on grammar and write prose that they felt best expressed the idea they wished to convey. That is to say, that slavish devotion to rigid patterns of usage is the domain of mediocre or insecure writers.
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November 19, 2009, 6:22 pmMark Field says:
17th century. The Quakers really pissed everybody off.
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November 19, 2009, 6:43 pmSomeJarhead says:
And yet no discussion of the fact that nearly all legal texts have an almost doctrinally consistent use of “she,” unless discussing a convict (usually a felon) who is exclusively a “he” — hmmmm...
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November 19, 2009, 6:52 pmAlice says:
September 2001 I was “the old lady student” in a law school, sitting in a “writing class” that was so big that it was held in a lecture hall.
A 2nd or 3rd year student selected by the professor was running the lecture that day. He stated that “Everyone must choose their own path” has become acceptable. It was like fingernails on an old-fashioned chalk board. ... I remember saying strongly, “I may not know law, but I know grammar, and you are wrong!”
I was adamant, and the young student refused to back down. He was probably 25 years my junior, and he thought “2-L” or “3-L” meant something. So that the class could move on, I finally said something like, “You absolutely are wrong, but I won’t argue the point here any longer.”
The professor (probably 15 years my junior) approached me after class and was annoyed. She asked if I’d like to go to her office (three floors up) to “discuss the matter.” I said, “No thanks, and I’m guessing that you’re feeling uncomfortable with a student almost old enough to be your mom, and certainly old enough to have learned grammar and diagramming sentences.”
I loved that law school, but that day I was left worrying about a law professor who would accept in her classroom someone teaching that “Everyone must choose their own path” was correct.
Eugene, please keep up the good fight for correct word usage!
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November 19, 2009, 6:55 pmArthurKirkland says:
Prof. Volokh:
For several reasons — playfulness, the explosion in law student population (and consequently disproportionate increase in those who might adopt the phrase) and raging anti-elitism, for starters — I wonder whether a concerted “tortoise interference” campaign might develop traction outside formal contexts.
Regarding your substantive question: I believe I detected, somewhere along the meandering, an argument that common usage could be sufficient to strong-arm incorrect usage into acceptability. I could have been mistaken, however.
I understand any puzzlement (or objection) concerning the introduction of a turtle to the relevant context, although I am nearly as puzzled by the wrestling of the likes of “significant” and “anxious” into submission. Many useful words have been lost to homogenization (I do not take credit for that term, but I like it), and the acquiesence that promotes their demise strikes me as an unwelcome nod to egalitarianism.
I apologize for triggering a six-thread meandering. None of these linguistic issues seems as important as the prospect that Sunday night’s show in Buffalo might be the final performance by the currently constituted E Street Band.
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November 19, 2009, 7:16 pmRiskable says:
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: One has only to point a finger at the preceding generation to find out who is responsible for “kids these days”.
–Riskable
“They were not burned by belief. They were burned by beleivers.”
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November 19, 2009, 8:03 pmmariner says:
erp:
Hell, the way things are going most people will wonder what those strange marks are.
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November 19, 2009, 8:05 pmAnatid says:
I’ve heard of people trying to introduce the word “zie” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, but the only folks I’ve ever met in person who used it were gender-obsessed and unbelievably annoying in their grammar, which might be why it’s never caught on.
As for “guys,” I feel that it has lost some of its gender-specific meaning. I will refer to an all-male group of friends, a mixed gender group, or an all-female group as “guys.” I’m less likely to use it on the all-female group, especially if we’re doing a more-stereotypically-female activity like shopping, but I still prefer it over “everyone.”
Part of it is that there really is no good female equivalent. Around here (Bay Area, CA) at least, “gals” has completely fallen out of use in under-30 folks. Although “y’all” is still acceptable, if not encouraged, in casual conversation.
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November 19, 2009, 8:17 pmarch1 says:
[slightly-off-topic warning]
Since this posting’s topic was introduced via a references to the “sex sensitivities of the colloquial speaker” I will take the opportunity to reference one of the most influential essays that I have read.
This essay single-handedly convinced me to make my English usage significantly less sexist. It did this by mapping the sexism of modern English into a hypothetical world whose English is racist in the same way, and to roughly the same degree, that our world’s English is sexist. Since I found that racism shocking, and couldn’t come up with any good rationale as to why my own language’s sexism should be considered any less shocking, I was cornered — I had to change:-)
If any of you have read the essay and found it less than convincing, I’d really appreciate hearing why.
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November 19, 2009, 8:43 pmSplunge says:
Give me a break, Professor Volt. Chill a bit. In the first place, since Faulkner and Joyce used even more shall we say idiosyncratic English in their excellent novels, should we now abandon the notion that English has orthodox forms, and a logic that underlies them?
No one is saying that when you have mastered orthodox English, including its underlying logic of subject-verb agreement, you can’t go on to write the Great English Language Novel using all kinds of curious constructions that enhance the power and charm of your writing. By all means. Knock yourself out. Picasso violated all the rules of perspective in his greatest work.
But — and here’s the point — Picasso could paint using the rules of perspective if he wanted to. The greatest English writers can write using perfectly orthodox plain-Jane English if they choose to. Recall that I was speaking of graded writing in school, not what students put on their Facebook pages.
The notion that requiring students to know and master orthodoxy stifles their lovely creativity is the kind of arrant nonsense I hear from my teenagers all the time (and really just because they want to avoid work). I doubt you’d tolerate such lines of argument from your law students, seeking (say) to avoid mastering the arguments in precedents when those arguments have been superceded, or can be ignored or contradicted by masters in the field.
Secondly, you’ll recall my complaint, to the extent I had one, was not about subject-verb agreement, but rather about the increasing replacement of the singular generic pronoun (he,his) with the plural (they,their) because of an absurdly exaggerated sensitivity to being seen as sexist. The problem is not that aesthetic taste will be injured, but that an essential informational component of language — whether the subject is singular or plural — will be lost by an awkward generic replacement of the singular pronoun with a plural.
Language evolves, to be sure. But it should evolve in the direction of increased clarity and flexibility. “Evolving” (really devolving) in the direction of less clarity because of social culture wars is to be deplored. And I deplore it.
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November 19, 2009, 9:08 pmPubliusFL says:
To some extent, though, “guy” seems to be displacing “man” as the generic term for a teen-to-adult male. Look at commercials for prescription medicines for men, personal grooming products for men, etc. Men seem to increasingly refer to themselves as “guys,” perhaps because they think “man” sounds old while “guy” sounds younger and hipper.
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November 19, 2009, 9:21 pmSplunge says:
I should add that if I found the fact that the generic singular pronoun is “he” to be indeed sexist — I’d say it was in the other direction from the conventional social myth. I find it laughable that one would read “he” in a sentence clearly about a generic person and feel there is some implication that only men are included. When the voter enters a polling booth, he must choose among candidates. OMFG! The author doesn’t think women should be allowed to vote! Pfui. I think you have to be taught to think that kind of silly way. (And before anyone gets to the identity politics, I have a daughter, and she, a superb writer, also thinks this is nonsense.)
When I read something written by someone who can write well, and is not subject to the modern weirdnesses, such as switching the generic pronoun every chapter, or something equally bizarre, then, when I read a she I am instantly under the impression that the author is talking about a specific, named person. If I don’t know who that is, I might well scan back in the work, looking for the specific female. The she tells me the sentence in question applies to someone in particular, not just to a generic person.
On the other hand, when I read he I have no such thought. If indeed the sentence is about a specific, named male, I’d have to know it from context. There’s no grammatical clue.
By me that’s unfortunate. I think there should be. Ideally, English would contain a generic person pronoun, then specific gendered pronouns for use when the sex of the subject person was known. That would allow a friendly and useful personalization of language when desired. It would also help disambiguate pronoun referents, and allow greater flexibility in their use.
But there isn’t. (Nor do I think the plural pronouns should be borrowed for the purpose, vide supra.) And if anything it seems a bit unfair that the pronoun for a specific, named male should be drafted into doing double duty as the pronoun for a generic person. If anything, it would seem to indicate a careless contempt for the importance of distinguishing specific males from a generic unit of the teeming millions, whereas such a dinstiction is preserved for females. One might argue it’s a bit like using distinguishing titles (Dr., Sen., Gov.) for females, but not males.
But that is, of course, equally silly. English is a Germanic language, and when it began, that is when it could be said to have formed its own identity, the gender of the pronoun matched the gender of the noun, not the sex of a person to whom the noun may have applied. (For example even in modern German one uses the neuter pronoun if the noun is Mädchen even though the person to whom this noun applies is obviously female.) The fact that we have a somewhat screwball notion of gender in our language today is merely the result of our long and chaotic transition away from our language’s fully gendered roots.
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November 19, 2009, 9:53 pmOren says:
Yes, an irony that escapes most (probably not most here).
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November 19, 2009, 10:20 pmyankee says:
I assure you, English speakers are not so dumb as to be unable to distinguish between singular and plural. We say “you are” to both singular and plural audiences, but we manage to distinguish in either case.
The question, then, is whether you think a modicum of extra ambiguity is worse than systemic sexism.
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November 19, 2009, 11:11 pmyankee says:
You’re right that it might prove such things. We might also be invaded by aliens from Jupiter tomorrow. The long list of uses of the singular ‘they’ from Shakespeare, well-respected 19th century writers, the King James Bible, etc. at least puts the burden on opponents of the singular ‘they’ to show that those uses were all regarded as “nonstandard” at the time. Nobody has presented any such evidence.
And yes, showing that singular ‘they’ was not nonstandard in the early 19th century does not show that it’s not nonstandard today. However, if singular ‘they’ was not historically nonstandard, and is widely used in contemporary English, opponents need to offer some explanation for why it’s “wrong.”
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November 19, 2009, 11:22 pmShelbyC says:
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November 20, 2009, 12:29 amarch1 says:
Splunge:
” I find it laughable that one would read “he” in a sentence clearly about a generic person and feel there is some implication that only men are included. When the voter enters a polling booth, he must choose among candidates. OMFG! The author doesn’t think women should be allowed to vote! Pfui. I think you have to be taught to think that kind of silly way. ”
Splunge, I’d be sincerely interested in your reaction to the essay I referenced above. Here’s a teaser (it was tough to find an excerpt which made total sense out of context, as the metaphor is quite thoroughgoing). The author is an apologist for the status quo in a hypothetical world in which our world’s sex has been mapped to that world’s race. Does er, whe remind you of anyone?-)
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November 20, 2009, 1:33 amneurodoc says:
Which “W.S”? I suppose you have in mind the Stratford rhymester. Personally, I would give great weight to whatever the recently passed Washingtonian (A“H) had to say on the subject of grammar and usage, especially the latter. (And I much respected his political opinions too, though they were at times somewhat right of my own.)
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November 20, 2009, 2:49 amneurodoc says:
arch1, thanks for that amusing teaser. I mean to go back and read the balance of the essay.
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November 20, 2009, 2:54 amTracy W says:
Alice — I thought the point of law school was to be able to learn how to make better arguments than “I’m right and you’re wrong”? And I am surprised at your surprise that a young man would dare to argue back with you about grammar rules — how else do you expect students to learn to argue except by doing?
Splunge, you say:
Splunge — isn’t using “them” as the third person gender-neutral plural an increase in clarity compared with the old system of using “him”? After all, “him” might refer to both genders or only to men, “they” clearly applies to everyone. As to whether the subject is singular or plural, I would hardly call that essential, English has got along with that indistictness in the second-person and yet survived everything the 19th and 20th centuries could chuck at it. Sometimes it is very useful to be able to use the word “you” in a flexible way that could encompass either a single person or a plural.
You can think me absurdly exaggeratedly sensitive to being seen as sexist if you chose, but I prefer to be clearer in my use of language than the old habit of using “him” for both genders allows.
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November 20, 2009, 3:23 amDavid Schwartz says:
I think this whole double-negative argument is misguided. Look, standard English permits “I didn’t see anybody” but disallows “I didn’t see nobody”. But if it did allow “I didn’t see nobody” to mean the same thing as “I didn’t see anybody”, it would only be because, in that context, “nobody” and “anybody” would mean precisely the same thing.
If one is a negative when used that way, then so must be the other. And if one is not a negative when used that way, neither can the other be.
That is, one can say that in “I didn’t see anybody”, the word “anybody” is being used as a negative, meaning nobody, and thus this is a double negative. And one can say that if English allowed “I didn’t see nobody”, it wouldn’t be a double-negative, because in that context, “nobody” would not be a negative (since it’s the hypothetical person you didn’t see).
In the phrase “I didn’t eat any french fries today”, “any” is a negative. Why? Because if English allowed “I didn’t eat no french fries today”, that would be a double-negative. Hence “no”, as used in that sentence (if it was allowed), would be a negative. Hence “any”, if used in that same way to mean that same thing must likewise be a negative.
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November 20, 2009, 5:51 amPubliusFL says:
I would have found it more convincing if English in fact had a history of “grammatical race” not necessarily connected to biological race, and “white” in fact did have a long history of use as a gender-neutral term. In the absence of such history, use of racial terms as in the essay is obviously more unsettling, but the fact that such history does exist for “man” and masculine pronouns seems a material difference. I find that English speakers I know whose first language still has full-fledged grammatical gender tend to be somewhat mystified by claims that English is “sexist.” But no Indo-European language has grammatical race.
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November 20, 2009, 6:50 amdeepti says:
i do agree our education system is gender bias and the government should deal with such problem asap.
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November 20, 2009, 8:22 amCrust says:
David Schwartz, I think you’re just confused. “Any” is not a negative in any of your examples, any more that it is in e.g. “Please take any one”. Also, if “no” is allowed as an intensifier, then it ceases to be a negative when used that way.
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November 20, 2009, 9:14 amerp says:
Re: referring to everyone as a guy
While it doesn’t bother me when a waiter or other service provider refers to me as a “guy” (I’m a 75 year old woman), a lot of other ladies mind a lot. They don’t see it as informal and friendly as I do.
After reading these comments about he/she/it, I feel empowered and will go back to using masculine pronouns as the default unless otherwise indicated!!!
Thanks guys.
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November 20, 2009, 9:38 amyankee says:
This is begging the question. The essay attempts to show that the use of the supposedly generic “he” and “man” is, in fact, not generic, and you respond by saying it would be more convincing if there weren’t a history of “he” and “man” being generic.
I presume you don’t mean “grammatical gender” in the sense that Romance languages have it, since English hasn’t had grammatical gender since Old English (or maybe early Middle English, I’m not sure).
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November 20, 2009, 10:44 amyankee says:
Incidentally, a lot of these uses of “man” were clearly not generic, since people found it objectionable to refer to a female “fireman” or “policeman.” It had to be “firewoman” or “policewoman.” If the use of “man” in such contexts were truly generic nobody would have found it the slightest bit odd to refer to a female fireman.
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November 20, 2009, 10:49 amTracy W says:
And to add to what Yankee says, sometimes people want to refer to men as distinct from women. For example: “Men can get breast cancer, though it is rare.” Or “In medieval England a law obliged all men to practice archery for two hours every Sunday.” (I’ve probably got the details of the law wrong, but I’m sure it didn’t apply to women.) Now you can add wording to make it clear that you are referring to men only, but that adds verbiage.
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November 20, 2009, 11:13 amarch1 says:
PubliusFL,
Thanks for your reply. In case it wasn’t clear, in the parallel world of the essay, parallel-English is to race as English is to sex in our world, and this extends to the respective languages’ longstanding conventions, roots, etc. It’s precisely because we have not been steeped in those parallel-world conventions that we can (potentially) see the racism in parallel-English more easily than we can see the sexism in English. If this isn’t responsive to the point you were making, then I missed your point; please follow up.
Houson Lawyer (“I always use masculine pronouns unless the context clearly requires otherwise. I take great pleasure in changing ‘chairperson’ to ‘chairman’”), the William Satire of the parallel world has what appears to be an analogous perspective:
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November 20, 2009, 1:11 pmDavid Schwartz says:
Crust:
The fact is, in “I didn’t eat any fries today”, “any” is a negative meaning “none”. (Even if you argue it refers positively to the fries you didn’t eat, it’s still a negative since there are no such fries.) The sentence is a legal English double negative just as it would be if it used the word “no” instead to mean precisely the same thing.
I assure you, I am not confused. The argument that “didn’t eat no” is a double negative while “didn’t eat any” is not even though the two words are used in precisely the same context to mean precisely the same thing is a load of hooey.
A word is not ‘inherently’ a negative for all its meanings in all it’s uses. It’s a negative if it’s used to negate something. If the “no” in “didn’t eat no fries” negates something, so must the “any” in “didn’t eat any fries”, since they are exactly the same meaning and use.
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November 20, 2009, 4:45 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Kids These Days -- Topsy.com says:
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Mark Field says:
Standard English may not use double negatives, but other languages do (e.g., Spanish). Should we therefore treat Spanish as “inferior” or Spanish speakers as “confused”?
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November 20, 2009, 7:22 pm