Earlier today, I posted quotes from prominent authors who use “them” with formally singular terms such as “everyone.” A commenter had earlier complained that “Already constructions like these are ubiquitous among high-school age writers, and sanctioned by their teachers.” I pointed out that they were apparently sanctioned by leading writers as well.
A commenter suggested that perhaps the quotes given above were just isolated errors on the authors’ part: “Even great writers commit infelicities on occasion. If you are telling me that Jane [A.] did this all the time, that would be meaningful.” Feeling the desperate need to procrastinate this morning, I decided to put that theory to the test, by doing some Google Books searches through the works of the notorious language-mangler Jane A., whom I mentioned above.
I won’t bore you with all the details and citations, which you yourself can uncover by searching for “everybody” with author Jane A. (despite her obvious inability to grasp the inexorable logic of the English tongue, she’s pretty famous, so you can probably deduce her last name). But suffice it to say that I found not one “everybody” matched with a singular pronoun — maybe there were some, but in that case I missed them — and several matched with “them.” “Everybody had a right to be equally positive in their opinion.” “Everybody had their due importance.” “If everybody was to drink their bottle a day.” “Their new dining-room prepared everybody for their keeping dinner-company.” “Everybody said, they never saw so fat a haunch.” “Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters.” And there are more.
Incidentally, Jane A. consistently uses everybody with the singular forms of verbs, e.g., “everybody is.” Yet she apparently sees nothing wrong with at the same time using the pronoun “they,” including in the line, “But everybody is to judge for themselves.” That’s precisely the sort of “jarring (I hope!) juxtaposition of the singular verb with the plural pronoun” that my original correspondent complained about. Maybe it’s jarring to that commenter, but many readers of P. and P. seem to have enjoyed the novel quite well despite it.
If you think that Jane A. was an outlier in consistently using “them” with “everybody,” and the other examples I gave were (unlike with Jane A.) themselves outliers in those authors’ bodies of work, then by all means provide some evidence of it. But I like to think that what I’ve posted so far at least shifts the burden of proof to those who want to argue that this phenomenon is somehow the special province of modern high-school age writers and their decadent loosey-goosey modern teachers.
UPDATE: Someone — whose need to procrastinate was apparently even greater than mine — actually has a much longer list of examples, all from Jane A.‘s work. The page also discusses the quotations vs. narration question, and more broadly goes into this in a great deal of detail; the detail, I think, amply supports the assertions I make above.
Georg Felis says:
My bad.
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November 19, 2009, 1:04 pmPubliusFL says:
But is the same usage followed in P. and P. and Z.?
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November 19, 2009, 1:13 pmDavid McCourt says:
EV,
Starting a new thread, and giving a partial account of the discussion in the old thread, is one way to deal with objections, I suppose. But you still haven’t addressed the objectioon that most of the ten or so instances of the usage by illustious writers that you cite occur in dialogue. I hardly think that does anything to shift your burden to show that good writers commonly do this.
As for Jane Austen, I’ll repeat here what I said in the thread you abandoned:
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, 1:24 pmEugene Volokh says:
David McCourt: My update points to a site that discusses the dialogue issue in some depth. And if she only used it in the dialogue of ill-educated characters and never (or almost never) in narration, then we might infer that she might have been deliberately using the construction as a marker of lack of education. Likewise, if it was only used in dialogue, even of well-educated characters, then perhaps she might have been treating it as an oral-only usage.
But of course she used it often in narration, which suggests that she thought of it as perfectly normal, both in written text and in dialogue. You say that “many” (I take it not all) of these “occur during Austen’s frequent resort to free indirect speech,” whatever precisely that might mean. But it seems to me that this just reflects Austen’s view that this usage is perfectly acceptable and normal in writing as well as in speech.
The only contrary evidence you point to that in Austen’s letters, there were “only three examples ... of this usage.” But I have no reason to think that three is a particularly small number here; and beyond that, my quick search didn’t find a single example of “everybody” used with a singular pronoun, just as it didn’t find a single example of such use in her novels.
So it seems to me that there is a very substantial body of data suggesting that Jane Austen used “everybody” routinely with a plural pronoun in her narration, in her characters’ dialogue, and in her own letters, and apparently almost never used the singular pronoun. (I found no such use of the singular pronoun in my searches for “everybody,” but I haven’t searched comprehensively for references to other similar terms, which is why I just say “apparently almost never.”) I should think that this is extremely powerful evidence that is hard to explain away by talk of “free indirect speech” or the supposedly small number of references in her own letters (a genre which I would think is less probative of educated written usage than is edited, published prose).
Now if you want to do further searches through the work of other authors, please do. Or if you want to introduce other actual evidence, as opposed to just assertion or assumption, that Austen was an outlier here, please do. But I think that the evidence outlined (and linked to) in the post does a pretty good job of, as I said, “shift[ing] the burden of proof to those who want to argue that this phenomenon is somehow the special province of modern high-school age writers and their decadent loosey-goosey modern teachers.”
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November 19, 2009, 1:48 pmMartha says:
Thanks, EV, for tackling this sort of linguistic ignorance. If people want to complain about “Jane A.,” I heartily recommend that they actually go to the trouble of checking a reference book (e.g., a credible reference written by research scholars, not just a pop-usage tract that summarizes someone’s individual preferences and assumptions). For example, the Merriam-Webster Concise Guide to English Usage has a thorough discussion–that agrees with you, EV–and that includes examples from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Jane Austen, W.H. Auden, Alan Moorehead, Sir Paul Harvey, Edith Wharton, Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, W.M. Thackeray, George Orwell, Robert Burchfield, etc. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language also agrees with you.
Sure, you’ll see lots of dialogue and narration in Austen–she was a novelist. But the claim that this usage occurs only in dialogue is demonstrably false.
The facts don’t matter to many people, but they ought to matter to people smart enough to read VC.
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November 19, 2009, 1:52 pmTheBadness says:
So very enjoyable, is it not, to debate a subject in which every participant is perforce an expert.
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November 19, 2009, 2:03 pmG. Shapiro says:
Steven Pinker’s attack on “language mavens” in The Language Instinct pretty much said it all.
“If you were the target of these lessons, at this point you might be getting a bit uncomfortable. Everyone returned to his seat makes it sound like Bruce Springsteen was discovered during intermission to be in the audience, and everyone rushed back and converged on his seat to await an autograph. .. The next time you get corrected for this sin, ask Mr. Smartypants how you should fix the following:
Mary saw everyone before John noticed them.
Now watch him squirm as he mulls over the downright unintelligible “improvement,” Mary saw everyone before John noticed him.
The logical point that you, Holden Caulfield, and everyone but the language mavens intuitively grasp is that everyone and they are not an “antecedent” and a “pronoun” referring to the same person in the world, which would force them to agree in number. They are a “quantifier” and a “bound variable,” a different logical relationship. Everyone returned to their seats means “For all X, X returned to X’s seat.” The “X” does not refer to any particular person or group of people; it is simply a placeholder that keeps track of the roles that players play across different relationships. In this case, the X that comes back to a seat is the same X that owns the seat that X comes back to. The their there does not, in fact, have plural number, because it refers neither to one thing nor to many things; it does not refer at all. The same goes for the hypothetical caller: there may be one, there may be none, or the phone might ring off the hook with would-be suitors; all that matters is that every time there is a caller, if there is a caller, that caller, and not someone else, should be put off.”
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November 19, 2009, 2:05 pmmatth says:
If the people objecting to the singular “they” today had been alive in the 1700s, I suspect many of them would have spent their free time writing letters to the editor bemoaning the singular “you.”
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November 19, 2009, 2:11 pmJoe says:
There’s some evidence that the pace of linguistic change slowed considerably as the written word became more common, particularly after the time of Shakespeare. (The meanings in his time of the words he used are considerably different than their meanings today.) Nevertheless, language continued to change. A prescriptivist from 50 or 100 years ago would find today’s prescriptivists to be ungrammatical.
I have no idea whether it’s true, but I wonder whether the relative rise of the spoken language (radio, television, movies, etc.) has increased the rate of change?
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November 19, 2009, 2:44 pmPLR says:
No, it is very enjoyable.
I mean yes.
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November 19, 2009, 2:58 pmDavid McCourt says:
EV, I quote you: “You say that ‘many’ (I take it not all) of these ‘occur during Austen’s frequent resort to free indirect speech,’ whatever precisely that might mean.”
Well, free indirect speech is not an obscure term, or concept, and I did explain what it is just after I mentioned it, so I’m perplexed by your perplexity. The point simply is that often Austen’s narration acts as a kind of impersonation of the voice of the character whose thoughts are being narrated, so that the simple “dialogue/narration” dichotomy employed by the site you mention is misleading. The usage is colloquial speech, and I never claimed that Austen only employed it in the dialogue of ill-educated characters, or even only in dialogue — that is Marth’s strawsomebody. On the other hand, she rarely used it when writing in her own voice.
But this is all a sideshow, as Austen’s usage alone would settle little, and I don’t think a few citations to a use or two by a handful of other prominent authors does more. If that were enough, every rule of usage would go to the wall, as examples of the great and good committing every error it is possible to commit are legion. Fowler’s books are in some ways a compendium of these thoroughbreds falling at the fence.
“Thanks, EV, for tackling this sort of linguistic ignorance.” Well, Martha, I share my ignorance with Fowler, with Strunk, with the Chicago Manual, and with other similar benighted fools and dead enders on this question that you consider closed to anyone with a brain, but thanks for the civil words. It amazes me how the enemies of dogmatic, prescriptive usage can be so . . . dogmatic, and blind to the irony.
EV, this whole discussion of “everyone/their” does not really address the initial question a correspondent raised concerning something you wrote: “Many thanks to attorney.org for their kind words.” Care to defend that usage?
[EV responds: (1) I had an entire post defending the “many thanks to attorney.org for their kind words” usage as idiomatic.
(2) Fowler’s discussion of the “everyone” question (under “number,” 11), “recommend[s]” variants of “he” rather than of “they,” but notes that using variants of “they” “is the popular solution.” I read Fowler’s discussion as a matter of aesthetic preference (he condemns “they” because “it sets the literary man’s teeth on edge,” and “recommend[s]” “he”), not as a judgment of what is correct and what is error.
Likewise, I find the Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk & White to be most credible for what they purport to be — stylistic recommendations. Their authors find certain usages to be preferable, for various reasons, and that’s fine. But their say-so counts for little, I think, in deciding what is correct usage.
Finally, I’m not inclined to search through more authors’ works; but if you’d like to produce evidence that Jane Austen was an outlier on this, I’ll be happy to see it.
(3) Your claim that Jane Austen rarely used “everybody ... them” when writing in her own voice rests on the fact that she only used it 3 times in her own letters. As I mentioned, she used “everybody ... he” (and variants of “he”) 0 times in her own letters, as best I can tell. In light of that, do you have particular reason for thinking that the evidence of her letters strongly suggests that she thought “everybody ... he” was somehow inapt, or inconsistent with her own voice?]
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November 19, 2009, 3:03 pmDavid Smallberg says:
Eugene, you say
Calling “they” a plural pronoun when it’s used with an indefinite antecedent is throwing fuel on the fire you’re trying to extinguish. As Matthew X. Economou said in the other thread, “they” has multiple uses. Talking about one use using a term that describes another muddies the waters.
Consider some uses of “has”:
1. A verb meaning “possesses”
2. An auxiliary used to form perfect tenses
You certainly wouldn’t say “When he said ‘Elvis has left the building’, Horace Lee Logan used a verb meaning ‘possesses’” when debating with someone who makes a claim that “has” always means “possesses” (I can’t imagine anyone would make such a claim, of course.)
[David: Excellent point; I’ve revised the post accordingly. –EV]
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November 19, 2009, 3:27 pmNot My Leg says:
Did Language Log’s containment fields fail sometime yesterday?
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November 19, 2009, 3:32 pmJohn Fast says:
She ain’t a-called “Calamity Jane” fer nothin’! Yee-haw!
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November 19, 2009, 3:51 pmGranite26 says:
Isn’t ‘them’ or ‘their’ commonly used in the sense of a gender neutral singular pronoun a la ‘his/hers’ or ‘him/her’ in addition to their usage as plural pronouns?
In that case it’s no wonder Austen used ‘their’ as opposed to ‘his’.
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November 19, 2009, 4:10 pmLeo Marvin says:
Breathless protests starting in 10, 9, 8....
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November 19, 2009, 4:13 pmEugene Volokh says:
Not My Leg: I don’t think Language Log has containment fields — I think the Loggers’ goal is for the light of their learning and argument to spill over their blog’s boundaries, and irrigate the thinking of the rest of us.
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November 19, 2009, 4:31 pmNal says:
First of all, it sounds right. Second, what is the alternative: “But everybody is to judge for himself or herself”? Too cumbersome. A set of subsets is still singular even if one refers to the subsets as them.
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November 19, 2009, 4:42 pmPaul McKaskle says:
My recollection is that British based publications such as the Economist use the plural pronoun when referring to a group of persons e.g., Parliament. The Economist also varies its spelling of words–e.g., honor, honour–depending on whether the subject of the article is British or American.
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November 19, 2009, 4:56 pmDavid McCourt says:
had sent a longish reply an hour ago, which I don’t see posted, though others’ have appeared. Perhaps it is the trouble I have had accessing this site lately, or perhaps something else?
I won’t reconstruct and repeat everything, so I’ll just to say that with regard to Austen and the wider world of authors, one swallow does not a summer make. The other grab-bag of referencess, to one or two instances of such usage by ten or so authors, don’t prove a case. And if that were enough, then any rule of usage would have to go to the wall, as there’s scarcely a single error of usage that hasn’t been committed by some dozen famous authors. Fowler’s books are in a sense a compendium of thoroughbreds falling at the fence.
Martha, I suppose I will have to take my stand with the “ignorance” of Strunk, and Fowler, and the Chicago Manual, and John Simon, and other mouth breathers, but thank you for the civil words. Funny how you start out on the side of laissez-faire against prescription, and end up regarding those who disagree with you as just ignorant.
EV, this fracas started out when someone questioned your writing: “Many thanks to lawyer.org for their kind words.” That’s a slightly different question than the “everyone/their” question, isn’t it? I appreciate your choosing the best ground to site your defense, but how about defending that usage?
[Some odd glitch kept comments from being posted for a while; your comment is now posted above, with my response included. –EV]
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November 19, 2009, 5:12 pmTCO says:
1. Several examples is not statistically relevant. You need to show that it was her normal pattern of usage. Also, is it the normal pattern of usage for most famous writers or some.
2. Your single example is pretty old. Rules of usage may have become more rigid over time.
3. Better off to use standard usage. People who don’t care aren’t disturbed by it. Those who do, find the converse jarring.
4. It’s kind of sophomoric to get annoyed with standard usage.
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November 19, 2009, 6:04 pmNal says:
Hmmm, the number of comments is 21 when viewed from the home page, but 17 when viewed from the thread.
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November 19, 2009, 6:16 pmOren says:
Indeed. The idea that one should consult S&W for their advice is distinct from the (apparently prevalent) notion that one ought to consider their recommendation as unassailable. I don’t think the authors seriously want the reader to substitute their usage in cases where it detracts from the semantic of stylistic content.
That is, S&W is a means, not an end. The end is clear and concise prose, adherence to normal usage is cases where it detracts from that end is the product of serious confusion between the two.
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November 19, 2009, 6:18 pmPubliusFL says:
I have a similar problem with the “Kids These Days” thread. The link from the home page says there are 41 comments, but when I view the thread only 27 are displayed (have tried refreshing and viewing from a different computer).
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November 19, 2009, 6:20 pmDavid McCourt says:
Publius and Nal. I find that one posting of mine, made hours ago, just showed up, way upstream, with comments by EV appended to the body of my post. EV, if you hold some posts for comment, a strange practice, but it’s your thread, could you please indicate this. I would not have posted a second time if I’d known.
[EV says: For reasons that elude me, your comment was flagged as spam. I added my responses and let it through, but then, for other reasons that likewise elude me, it was held up for some hours. (That’s what the other commenters are remarking about when they talk about comment counts on the front page differing from the comment counts in the displayed thread.) All I can say for the future is that comments are usually promptly posted but occasionally get held up.]
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November 19, 2009, 7:03 pmPintler says:
I think there are three kinds of people:
1)People who are masters of language: Lincoln, Shakespeare, Churchill, etc. These people ignore, or perhaps transcend, grammatical rules (“The practice of ending sentences with a pronoun is a practice up with which I will not put”).
2)People who worship at the altar of Strunk & White.
3)People who use language to communicate, and are happy to break rules to accomplish that. My father (career Army), for example, could speak a number of English dialects, from polished to profane, according to the audience and situation. I know police officers that can also speak in many mission appropriate dialects.
(I’m a subset of 3: I’m a computer nerd, and thus spend much of my time adhering to the rigid syntax of computer languages; when I use English, I revel in not having to satisfy all the rules before the compiler will let me run the doggone program)
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November 19, 2009, 7:35 pmOren says:
In my experience, they don’t hold posts for comments but do feel free to append a response in []‘s.
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November 19, 2009, 7:50 pmBill Poser says:
NotMyLeg@This is far from the first time that EV has posted on such a topic. We may have to adopt him at LL.
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November 19, 2009, 8:01 pmRandy says:
Come now, professor! Surely you doesn’t mean that rules of ‘every sort’ is abhorrant! Some rules are perfect well. Good even. if everyone had his or her own rule regards language we would, find, it difficult to read.
I think you mean that the rules that prescriptivists harp upon that that are abhorrant — no split infinitives, don’t start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’, no double negatives — these are silly rules that most sensible people ignore. But most sensible people also follow basic rules for clarity’s sake.
[Don’t I have an adjective in front of the “Grammatical” in the title? –EV]
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November 19, 2009, 8:04 pmMartha says:
David McCourt: I notice that you would rather defer to people who pronounce aesthetic preferences than to scholars who study how the English language works (and in the case of “singular they,” has always worked). That’s your right. But it doesn’t make you well-informed, it just makes you opinionated.
Worthwhile reference books: on correct English usage–The Merriam-Webster Concise Guide to English Usage; on writing well (as opposed to merely avoiding error) –Joseph Williams’ _Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace_.
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November 19, 2009, 8:35 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
My daughter had some teeth-gritting moments in her freshman English class in college, in which all of her passive-voice verbs were marked off. So for instance, if she was writing about an author, and she said that his work was included in So-and-so’s anthology, that was marked off for passivity.
In high school, for a period of time, they did that to draw the kids’ attention to passive voice and jar them out of using it. Afterward, it was reintroduced b/c sometimes it is appropriate. As in the above instance — she wasn’t writing about the anthology, she was writing about the author’s work and how widely it was published. At the end of the semester, she had to write an essay about how her work had improved due to that class. She emailed the essay to me before she turned it in. There was an entire paragraph that started, “Now we come to my use of passive voice.” I have to say I probably wouldn’t have dared to turn in such a thing, myself, but she sure did.
...
Of course one violates rules of grammar colloquially, to strike the tone one wants. If my daughter and I decide on the spur of the moment to run out for some ice cream, I’m likely to say, “Me and F are going to Bruster’s.” The trick is that you know what you’re doing and you do that on purpose ... and you don’t have a pedantic audience assuming that you don’t know better.
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November 19, 2009, 8:37 pmDavid McCourt says:
Martha, I happen to disagree with you, and, yes, I regard language as something to which aesthetic judgments properly should be applied, as opposed to some abstract phenomenon fit only for study by social scientists. But that doesn’t make me ill-informed — ignorant, was your word — and your condescension in offering a list of well-known reference texts, including one on clarity — and “grace” of all things — is clear, but hardly gracious.
The singular “they” controversy is, for some, tied up with sexual politics, which for many outweighs any question of aesthetics — reactionary concept that that is. But clarity in expression is not advanced by the sort of quotes that EV mustered in favor of his position. It is he that is deferring to authority when he justifies his misusage by arguing, not that it is clearer, or more elegant or expressive, but that Austen did something similar on X number of occasions, so it must be the better way.
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November 19, 2009, 10:06 pmOren says:
I don’t think EV ever said one usage was better than the other.
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November 19, 2009, 10:16 pmBill Poser says:
Years ago I translated Japanese computer manuals into English. The manufacturer was concerned with obtaining good translations and issued guidelines, one of which was that the passive was to be avoided. Compliance was very difficult and occupied a disproportionate fraction of my time. Japanese is a language in which the subject need not be expressed and much of the time is not, so many sentences read like: “computes the square root function using the Newton-Raphson method”. This naturally translates as a passive: “The square root function is computed using the Newton-Raphson method”. Coming up with a subject is difficult. Is it the computer? The mathematical function library? The procedure implementing the square root function?
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November 19, 2009, 11:34 pmGuy says:
I generally use the singular they when I need a gender neutral pronoun, sometimes “one” if I don’t mind sounding British and/or pretentious. I’ve even been known to write (gasp!) themself on occasion. But I’m personally curious to know how people feel about the generic she (e.g. “each person should cast her vote for the candidate she prefers”). I’ve only ever used it in writing once, in a college essay, when I was feeling particularly saucy. I was concerned I might alienate the reader, but then remembered I was at UC Berkeley. I didn’t really have a political point, I just thought it was cute and fun, and I’d never tried using it before. I think its funny how riled up some people get over the gender politics of pronoun usage.
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November 20, 2009, 12:20 amDavid McCourt says:
“Likewise, I find the Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk & White to be most credible for what they purport to be — stylistic recommendations.
Indeed. The idea that one should consult S&W for their advice is distinct from the (apparently prevalent) notion that one ought to consider their recommendation as unassailable. I don’t think the authors seriously want the reader to substitute their usage in cases where it detracts from the semantic of stylistic content.
That is, S&W is a means, not an end. The end is clear and concise prose, adherence to normal usage is cases where it detracts from that end is the product of serious confusion between the two.”
I entirely agree with this, and think that a strawman is being created about some supposed blind adherence to a rule under each and every possible circumstance. What rule of language is unassailable? But to recognize, as I do, that a rule of usage may have to be bent, or even broken on occasion, as it cannot adequately address every particular circumstance, and to call the rule “spurious” and an object of “abhorrence” — well, those are two very different things.
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November 20, 2009, 9:37 amOren says:
When I write documentation, I try to assign agency to the lowest level of the hierarchy capable of giving the answer. So, unless the procedure requires data from the library, I’d say the procedure calculates.
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November 20, 2009, 9:46 amMartha says:
David, it seems that we have been talking at cross purposes.
I never called you ignorant–I thanked EV for tackling “linguistic ignorance,” meaning the confusion of “preferences” with “correctness.” I hadn’t scoured VC to determine who EV was quoting, because I was not commenting on any person, but on an unfortunately common phenomenon. I’m sorry that my phrasing made you feel attacked.
Second, of course aesthetic judgments can be properly applied to writing. Judge away–we all do. What I disagree with is the claim that aesthetic judgments = essential fact about English.
Third, no one said that “Austen’s way is the better way.” EV said that it’s permissible to use “they” with an indefinite antecedent, and he is correct, as any reference on English grammar will confirm. Rules that don’t conform to actual longstanding English usage are properly called “spurious.”
Fourth, I recommended two titles because, in my experience, people are often interested in such things. My recommendation was not about you (though you might actually like the books).
Sexual politics–not my hobby horse. Wanting people to distinguish between fact/opinion about English IS my hobby horse. :) That, also, is not a comment on you. If you’re not making a normative claim about English but simply expressing what you like, then we do not disagree.
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November 20, 2009, 10:05 amcjwynes says:
I agree with Granite26, I think the most natural reason is that “everyone” can include a mixed gender group, and “their” is a more natural sounding pronoun than the clunky “his or her”.
I see this sort of gender-neutral hedging all the time in video game dialogue, in which the script writer does not know whether the player will choose to play the game as a male or female character. Rather than record two sets of all the dialogue, you get sentences like “The Hero took their money and rode to the next village.” Those kind of sentences don’t even have the excuse of mistaking the subject for a plural, they’re just clearly using “their” to mask the gender problem. I think that’s what most people, consciously or subconsciously, are doing when they use “their” like that.
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November 20, 2009, 10:54 amDoc Merlin says:
“Spurious Grammatical “Rules” of Every Sort Are My Abhorrence”
Best ever use of passive voice!
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November 20, 2009, 11:39 amDavid Newton says:
What is the alternative to the use of they/them/their used as a singular, neuter pronoun?
One sound pretentious to many ears. It sounds rude to many ears. A need has arisen for a generic, gender-neutral pronoun which, in one word, expresses what would otherwise take at least three words. I would also point out that there is and there are are both perfectly correct usages. Is “there” singular or plural? It could be argued that it can be either.
I do not see what is wrong with the sentence, “My worst enemy will meet their match today with a custard pie.” It is certainly a banal sentence, and some might say an odd sentence. Why is it wrong grammatically?
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November 20, 2009, 11:41 amSteve P. says:
David McCourt, I think you’re moving the goalposts. Remember this?
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November 20, 2009, 11:57 amDavid McCourt says:
David Newton, I think the example you have chosen is a particularly bad one in which to use the plural “they/them/their” as a singular pronoun, because “My worst enemy” singles out a particular, solitary individual, making the construction “their match” even more discordant. If you said “every enemy” will meet “their match,” that would be slightly better, because you are appplying the plural pronoun to a collection of people, rather than one, but to my ear at least, it still sounds clunky.
Please give me your reaction to the examples below. It seems clear to me that the singular generic pronoun is far cleaner and freer of ambiguity than the supposedly equally acceptible plural they. Other than “sexism” in usage, what is the objection to this?
“England expects that every man will do his, er, their duty.”
So now he has to do, not only his own duty, but that of those other folks, too. So, with the death of the “spurious rule,” we’ve moved from Nelson’s world to that of Clement Atlee.
“Every dog hath his, er, their day.”
When will the poor fella get a day of his own?
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November 20, 2009, 12:02 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
David, the choice is between your poor fella (male, obviously — did you catch that?) wondering when he will get a day of his own, and half the dog population being convinced that they’ll never get one.
Here is a thought-experiment for you, based, sadly, on my personal experience. Suppose that you are a woman, and the only woman on the management team at a chemical plant. The plant manager who hired you, and wants your valuable input into management decisions, is fired when the plant is bought, and the replacement manager loovveesss to go to Hooter’s all the time. Even his credit card is a Hooter’s card. Suddenly the on-site management meetings are a thing of the past, and management decisions are made by “the guys” at 2-hour lunches at Hooter’s, to which you are not invited, b/c it would never occur to anyone to ask you to go there. After the meetings, the production manager, who knew you from before, comes into your office to debrief you on what was decided, and when you say things like, “How are we going to do such-and-such without so-and-so?”, things that you would have said at the meeting had you been there, his response is “Oh.”
Now a man tells you that the default pronoun being “he” doesn’t bother him, so it shouldn’t bother you either.
How do you imagine you would feel about that?
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November 20, 2009, 1:42 pmDavid McCourt says:
cjwynes,
“The Hero took their money and rode to the next village.”
This makes it sound as if the hero took some other people’s money, rather than his own, and is one of the reason’s why this usage is frowned upon. Better to be supposedly sexist than definitely muddled and ambiguous.
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November 20, 2009, 1:47 pmDavid McCourt says:
Laura, as for your example, I’d feel outraged and discouraged by the behavior described in your second paragraph — I feel that way now, and I’m not a woman, or there — and I would start looking for a job at a place that was smart enough to think better of people; they exist, even in neanderthal industries like securities trading, where my wife works.
The last sentence is not the problem with this clod boss, the rest of the story is, and things would be no better if the guy said he/she while hanging out at Hooters. My own boss is a woman, who uses “he” as the generic, because she loves the language, and doesn’t think that making her writing less clear will solve sex discrimination.
Your post does point to one irony though: many of the linguistic attackers of “prescription” when it comes to the “singular they” are animated by the wish to enjoin the use of the generic male. That is the mother of all prescriptions at work here.
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November 20, 2009, 2:04 pmDavid McCourt says:
Speaking of dogs, Shakespeare writes about dogs:
every one according to the gift which bounteous nature
Hath in him clos’d.
I am struck, in looking at the evidence for the supposed accepted use of the “singular they” down the centuries, by how sparse it really is. Apart from Jane Austen — there EV struck the mother lode at his first spadeful of earth, and Austen is trumpeted by the “singular use is OK” crowd — no authors are shown to have employed this usage with anything like regularity. Instead, the same few potted citations are continually given; these are more or less the same examples that were rooted out by Jespersen in 1894, with a few others, and have been handed down ever since.
What do they amount to? One instance in the King James Bible. Two in Shakespeare — and I see that one of these: “And every one to rest themselves betakes,” from the poem Lucrece was actually published in the original 1594 edition, and a second edition, as “And every one to rest himselve betakes,” being changed — by author?, by printer? – to “themselves” only in a third edition in 1600. Two (or one and a half) instances? Pretty thin gruel, out of Shakespeare’s 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and two long narrative poems.
The rest of the evidence, Austen excepted, is of a similar sort: the odd citation here and there — one from Thackeray, one from Richardson, etc., — and a fairly long list of 50 or so can be constructed, of one example or so per decade, by reaching down to the likes of Sir Kenhelm Digby and Walter Bagehot for their solitary contributions. And this proves that the “singular they” has always been accepted as an alternate and perfectly good construction? Only to the already convinced, or to those looking for a justification for the abolition of the generic “he/his/him.”
I did look at some of Locke’s writings — Two Treatises on Government, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — and found one instance of “singular they,” amid several score instances where the “Spurious Rule” is followed. I checked Milton’s works, admittedly, with something less than a fine toothed comb, and could find no instances of the singular they. But they’d already be on everyone’s list, right?
Just where is all the evidence that this rule has been regarded as spurious by our best writers in centuries past, and that they embraced, or regularly employed, an alternate usage? One presumably could construct a similar list of stray violations by the illustrious of just about any rule of grammar or usage, so proving, by these lights, that we have no rules. If this rule is to be abhorred as truly spurious, surely something more in the way of evidence is needed than this.
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November 20, 2009, 3:31 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
It wouldn’t occur to the guy hanging out at Hooters to say he/she, and that’s the problem.
Sometimes language illuminates thought. If the default pronoun is male, it’s a short hop from there to the default person being male. Females are an after-thought, a special case. You have people, and then you have women. As I said, maybe you have to be on the receiving end of this sort of thing to get it. It gets mighty tiresome, I can tell you. One feels downright invisible after a while. I can tell you that the generic “he” used not to bother me as much as it does now, having had this experience; and men getting indignant at the idea that they should not always use the generic “he”, insisting that it’s not a problem and no one with sense minds it, used not to bother me as much as it does now.
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November 20, 2009, 4:13 pmLeo Marvin says:
There’s a Hooters Visa card? Does using it earn Frequent Lapdance Miles?
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November 20, 2009, 4:17 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
There is either a Visa or Mastercard with the Hooters name and logo on it. I saw it. I don’t know if it earns FLMs. I am told that the Hooters “girls” don’t do lapdances and such, but that they are very, very, very nice, and that’s why all the guys like to go there. Of course.
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November 20, 2009, 4:38 pmLeo Marvin says:
Yes and no. First, I’d say “criticize and stigmatize” is more accurate than “enjoin.” Second, most people with this interest, e.g., Laura, aren’t attacking the grammatical prescription qua grammatical prescription. They’re advocating a social norm. For example, I typically use the aesthetically clunky “s/he” because the social sensitivity is more important to me than the aesthetic is. (My writing is bereft of style anyway, so it’s no loss.) You may prioritize the language rule, but don’t conflate the categories of the opposing arguments and objectives. And don’t conflate Laura’s argument with Eugene’s, which is independent of the social concerns.
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November 20, 2009, 4:58 pmDavid McCourt says:
Leo,
When I say enjoin, I’m not speaking literally. “Criticize and stigmatize,” as you call it, is all the prescriptive grammarians ever did as well.
I’m not speaking of Laura or EV, but I think the statement you quote is an accurate statement of fact. Just look for yourself at the bibliography attached to one site, already linked in these discussions, concerning the “singular they” issue:
Abbott, Gerry. “Unisex ‘they’”, English Language Teaching Journal, 1984. 38, 45–48.
Baron, Dennis. Grammar and Gender, Chapter 10. 1986. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bodine, Anne. “Androcentrism in Prescriptive Grammar: Singular ‘they’, Sex-indefinite ‘he’, and ‘he or she’”, Language in Society, 1975. 4, 129–146.
articles “Agreement: indefinite pronouns” and “They, their, them” in E. Ward Gilman ed. Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. 1989. Springfield Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster.
Green, W. H. “Singular Pronouns and Sexual Politics”, College Composition and Communication, 1977. 28, 150–153.
Hofstadter, Douglas R. “Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness” and “A Person Paper on Purity in Language”, Chapters 7 and 8 in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, 136–167. 1985. New York: Basic Books.
Jespersen, Otto. Section 5.56 in A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Part II: Syntax, First Volume, 137–140, addenda p. 495. 1913 (1948).
Korsmeyer, Carolyn. “The Hidden Joke: Generic Uses of Masculine Terminology”, in Mary Vetterling-Braggin ed. Sexist Language: A Modern Philosophical Analysis, 116–31. 1981. New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams & Co.
Martyna, Wendy. “The Psychology of the Generic Masculine”, in Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, eds. Women and Language in Literature and Society, 69–78. 1980. New York: Praeger.
Meyers, Miriam Watkins. “Forms of they with Singular Noun Phrase Antecedents”, Word, 1993. 44 181–191.
Miller, Casey and Kate Swift. Words and Women. 1976. Garden City, New York: Anchor.
Mühlhäusler, Peter and Rom Harré. “He, She, or It: The Enigma of Grammatical Gender”, Chapter 9 in Pronouns and People: The Linguistic Construction of Social and Personal Identity, 229–247. 1991. Basil Blackwell.
Newman, Michael. “Pronominal Disagreements: The Stubborn Problem of Singular Epicene Antecedents”, Language in Society, 1992. 21, 447–475.
Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct, 378–379. 1994. New York: W. Morrow.
Sklar, E. S. “The Tribunal of Use: Agreement in Indefinite Constructions”, College Composition and Communication, 1988. 39, 410–422.
Stanley, J. P. “Sexist Grammar”, College English, 1978. 39, 800–811.
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November 20, 2009, 5:19 pmLeo Marvin says:
David,
I’m not sure how that contradicts what I said. I agree many of the common arguments against your preferred construction are essentially hermeneutic. But those are irrelevant to your argument with Eugene. Bringing them up in that context, as I believe you did with Martha, at best confuses the issue.
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November 20, 2009, 7:10 pmDavid McCourt says:
Leo, The issue of “sexism” and usage is irrelevant to my argument with Eugene, except to the extent that the issue has made some of the scholarship concerning past usage of the “singular they” result-oriented and over-stated.
I don’t believe I brought up sexism and usage; it seems to me that Laura did, and I was responding to the thought experiment she posed.
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November 20, 2009, 7:30 pmMartha says:
David McCourt:
Except for this:
Not that I have anything against googling through some 18th century texts, or divining the politics of someone else’s works cited page, but if you’re really interested in how standard English works, there are reference books you can consult, written by people who spend their careers studying how standard English works.
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November 20, 2009, 9:35 pmLeo Marvin says:
Actually, you mentioned it first.
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November 20, 2009, 9:36 pmLeo Marvin says:
Jinx!
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November 20, 2009, 9:37 pmMartha says:
And this reference, written for general readers, is available free via googlebooks.
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November 20, 2009, 9:42 pmLeo Marvin says:
To the extent sources quoted by anyone here have been so tainted, you may have a point. Do you have evidence of that?
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November 20, 2009, 9:44 pmDavid McCourt says:
Martha, apart from linking to reference books, could you please make a substantive comment? (By the way, there are reference books whose conclusions disagree with yours: see, e.g., the American Heritage Dictionary, and B. Garner, Dictionary of Modern American Usage). But apart from the bibliography, can you please point to evidence in your books, beyond that already discussed here, for the proposition that the “singular they” was regarded as standard usage, or was regularly used, by any well known writers — Austen noted — in the 400 years before 1900? The odd, single instance by someone who wrote thousands of pages doesn’t really count.
Leo, you ask: “To the extent sources quoted by anyone here have been so tainted [by the sexism issue], you may have a point. Do you have evidence of that?”
Direct evidence is impossible — I cannot read minds — but here is a representative comment on the crux of the issue by a source touted by Martha, Merriam_Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (under “everybody, everyone”):
“[T]here is an assertion [in another book] that reference to everyone (or everybody) by they, their, them is not sanctioned by good writing. The assertion is false. Such reference may be found in important literature and other reputable writing from the 16th century to the present.”
Following this categorical statement is a predictable listing of the same few references I mentioned earlier. No attempt is made to develop a broader factual basis for the sweeping claim made. This is not reference material, but polemic. The source admits, as it could scarcely deny, that this issue has received much attention in recent years from “those concerned with women’s issues.”
Also, look at this site, linked to by EV and another poster in this discussion, for the material on Austen:
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html#incorrectly
The site is devoted to an entirely one-sided presentation of the issue. Austen is highlighted, though she is apparently the only famous writer who regularly made use of the “singular they.” The other, familiar, stray instances of “singular they” usage by other authors are presented as if they were merely examples of wider, more regular usage, rather than what seems to be all that can be found. Immediately following this treatment is a section devoted to “Singular ‘their’ and linguistic sexism in English.” Of course, the correct position on the first issue is necessary to the desired solution to the second. I cannot connect the dots for you, but a review of this material will be all you need.
I always thought that lawyers — present-minded people mining the past for any snippet to use in a current argument, made very bad historians; apparently, linguists make even worse historians than do lawyers.
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November 20, 2009, 11:09 pmMike G in Corvallis says:
Incredible post!
Some people are just hung up on clarity.
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November 21, 2009, 3:51 amTracy W says:
“England expects that every man will do his, er, their duty.”
I think this was intentionally confined to men only. While there were women on the ships at Trafalgar, this wasn’t officially known (even if every single official did actually know it).
So:
England expects that every man will do his duty makes sense in a context where it was officially believed that only men were involved.
For modern-up dating:
England expects that every sailer will do their duty.
England expects that every citizen will do their duty.
These modern alternatives both sound fine to me. The word “every” makes it clear that we’re talking in the singular.
And I will note that given the death rate at Trafalger, every surviving man (and woman) did wind up doing the duty of quite a few more people than theirselves.
I agree that “Every dog hath his day” is clearer than “Every dog hath their day”. Part of the difference here I think is that the explanation is metaphorical, Shakespeare was not making a point that only applied to dogs as in members of the family called canines. So the interest in being clear about whether you are talking about all people or only about men (vive la difference!) doesn’t bit here. People should use the language that clearly makes their point, not every grammatical rule is right for every single circumstance. “Every man should have his prostrate examined ...” sounds fine to me, at least in terms of grammar, I am no doctor.
As for your rewriting of “The Hero took their money and rode to the next village”, cjymynes was talking about video games when the character could be played as either male or female. Under the normal customs of English usage a person who is known to be female is referred to by the female pronoun in language. If you refer to them with a male pronoun, you are breaching a custom. So here, in order to avoid breaking one custom of grammer, you advise breaking another one, one in my experience that is far more common. I do not understand your rationale.
As for your examples, it strikes me that there have been two customs come down through English, one of using the word “him” with “every” and one of using the word “every” with “them”. Much of these date from a time when women were not expected to have a role in public life, but instead stay at home raising babies. While there were many exceptions throughout history (eg Queen Mary I of England, Eleanor of Acquaitine) these were recognised exceptions and were often attacked for being involved in men’s work (in the sense referring to men only), see for example Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women”.) Now we are moving to a situation where reliable contraception means that far more women are engaged in public life, so there are more gains to being clear about when we are referring to all people as opposed to when we are only referring to men. It is noticeable that Jane Austen, who was writing books centered around women’s lives uses the singular “they” construction so much.
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November 21, 2009, 6:47 amDavid McCourt says:
Tracy W, Interesting post.
“England expects that every sailor will do their duty.” Apart from leaving out the Marines – that’s a Royal Marine officer lying next to Nelson on the deck of HMS Victory – I think this is far less direct and personal. (Nelson would never use the French Revolutionary term “citizens” while preparing to fight the French Navy). Nelson is trying to impress on each individual that the individual has a duty that cannot be shirked or left to others. Similarly, “every enemy will meet their match today,” mentioned above, conjures up an image of one great reckoning, a giant battle where the enemies all suffer the same fate, like the Egyptians and the Red Sea; “every enemy will meet his match” is more personal and vivid; each will meet his individual fate.
As for “hero will take their ammunition,” being understood to mean hero will take his own ammo, I suppose gamers can have any kind of private code they want in the world that they build — Monty Python built a world where a name was spelled “throat warbler mangrove,” and pronounced “Smith” – but to ordinary users of English, outside of that private world, which is where we are, telling the person hero to “take their ammunition” means telling hero to take someone else’s ammunition. Hero will “take his/her ammo,” “take hero’s ammo,” “take the ammo provided,” “take own ammo”, are all pretty awkward, but as a simple directions or battlefield orders they beat “hero will take their ammo” for clarity, at least. “Hero will take his ammo” is neither awkward nor unclear. If the “his” grates, remember these words:
“It is not from criticism but from this world that stories come in the beginning; their origins are living reference plain to the writer’s eye, even though to his eye alone.”
They were written by the first writer to be published by the Library of America while still living: the writer — the female writer — Eudora Welty (The Writer’s Eye, 1989).
It is an interesting idea that you have of “two customs com[ing] down through English, one of using the word ‘him’ with ‘every’ and one of using the word ‘every’ with ‘them.’” This is what some reference books imply, but do not demonstrate. But the idea doesn’t appear to be reflected in actual written usage: the “Spurious Rule” was the mainstream usage, even when “every one” was used, rather than “every man”; the “singular they” looks to be a barely peripheral usage, unused by most authors. Your speculations about Austen aside, until we hear different from Martha’s references, Austen appears to be the exception, even among female novelists of the 19th century.
I agree that there are some usage problems with the Spurious Rule, and instances where it just cannot sensibly be used – there is a hole in the language – but the examples you discuss are not where the usage problems lie. As for sexual politics, that’s another matter.
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November 21, 2009, 11:34 amMartha says:
David McCourt:
You mean without hurting your feelings again? Probably not.
You believe everyone should conform to your preferences, based, apparently, on the fact that you have strong feelings about them. Your feelings are shared by Fowler (who had the good sense not to insist that his opinions = linguistic fact, not that you noticed) and Strunk/White (whose style recommendations were decent, grammar knowledge less so) and other sources that provide style recommendations (AHD usage board) that you apparently can’t distinguish from research grammars. You further seem to believe that the only reason anyone would ever disagree with you is sexual politics. Because some who have written on this topic are feminists, all others, from Jesperson to Pinker, are apparently suspect.
Meanwhile, anyone with even an undergraduate knowledge of the history of the language knows that spurious rules have been invented whole cloth by prescriptive grammarians at least since Lowth and Murray in the 17th century. Some of these “rules” (e.g., Fowler’s proposed that/which rule, or your obsession with everybody/they) never matched standard English usage, not even the usage of educated, admired writers. This mismatch didn’t prevent some people from following the rules anyway, and some rules became shibboleths. Shibboleths are worth knowing because people like you believe in them–but shibboleths are all they are.
One way to learn about standard English usage is to study it: to analyze texts from before and after a given rule was invented, to study reliable corpora, to conduct scientific examinations of current usage. Another way is to learn from what the people who do conduct such research have discovered. You don’t have time or training for the first method, and you’re not willing to be convinced by the second. So nothing written in a blog comment is likely to persuade you either. That’s ok. This isn’t a life or death issue. Believe what you want to believe. Revel in your superiority.
E pur si muove.
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November 21, 2009, 12:02 pmDavid McCourt says:
“One way to learn about standard English usage is to study it . . . Another way is to learn from what the people who do conduct such research have discovered.”
Yes, Martha, and I asked you if you could please provide some evidence, from your study, or from what the researchers you continually mention have discovered, beyond the fragmentary stuff already discussed here, for the proposition that the “singular they” was regarded as standard usage, or was regularly used, by any well known writers — Austen already noted — in the 400 years before 1900? The odd, single instance by someone who wrote thousands of pages doesn’t really count.
And you respond with the . . . diatribe above, about my lack of training, and all the ignorance perpetrated by sub-undergrad “people like me.” Well, that’s all very interesting. Thing is, I had something in mind more like evidence, rather than name calling. So I take it this means that you don’t have such evidence. Never mind, stick to what you do best. Perhaps someone else will provide it.
Quoting Galileo at others doesn’t get you very far, when you appear to be in thrall to a priesthood of researchers whose assertions must be accepted unquestioningly, but whose evidence cannot be recited or examined.
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November 21, 2009, 1:29 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Not convinced of this, myself.
What’s wrong with “England expects each of you to do your duty”? Or “England expects each of you sailors to do your duty” if you want to leave out the Marines?
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November 21, 2009, 2:16 pmDavid McCourt says:
Laura, I can’t see anything wrong with “England expects each of you to do your duty.” There’s no singular they-ness problem there, as far as this un-trained eye can see — which isn’t very far. Your is ton, ta, tes, votre and vos, so it agrees with “each.”
It’s each of them, not each of you, that get’s us back into the hot water we’ve been swimming in:
Each of them must do his...
Each of them must do their...
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November 21, 2009, 3:52 pmEric Rasmusen says:
Prof. Volokh, I’d value your opinion on what is a much harder question than whether “Everyone thought they were right” is valid, which is the singular “they” as applied to organizations. Here’s an excerpt from a student paper:
“The US Navy took the lead in this research. They saw an opportunity...”
This is common in educated speech, but it is against the rules of style. It is contrary to parallelism, but in accord with the reality that organizations are not real persons. What should we do?
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November 21, 2009, 7:03 pmMartha says:
David McCourt, what type of evidence are you actually willing to consider? My first comment summarized a source that cited many more writers than Austen, but you aren’t going to be persuaded by mere example. Then I mentioned other sources, but first you were offended at my condescension, then you accused me of being “in thrall” to those who actually study grammar. You’ve scoffed at someone else’s list of scholarly sources because it had feminist articles in it. It’s hard to know what else to tell you.
But as I said, distinguishing between fact/opinion about English is my hobby horse, so one last try–I apologize for its length. Here’s an example of the kind of research that’s out there (and this is just something I happen to have handy on a Saturday night–if you’re interested, the Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts dbase is a good place to find more):
Mark Balhorn. “The Rise of Epicine ‘They’” Journal of English Linguistics, Vol. 32 / No. 2, June 2004 79–104.
I just looked over the article again. Balhorn summarizes studies of present-day English, 18th century English, 19th century English, and OED quotations, all of which find a high incidence of “they” with grammatically singular, generic antecedents. Next, he constructs a theory to answer the question “How could a construction that violates a grammatical pattern so resilient and otherwise inviolable throughout the language, number agreement, become common and perhaps even indispensable?” His theory (based on general theories of agreement by previous linguists) is that the notional number and unspecified gender of the antecedent, as well as the distance between the antecedent and pronoun, affects when people use “they” pronouns with grammatically singular antecedents. (I’ve just typed, then deleted, a longer explanation because it was too much for a blog comment, but Balhorn spells this out in some detail, with examples from present-day English, and explains how this theory predicts that epicene ‘they’ would arise after English lost grammatical gender. (NB: Old English used to have grammatical gender–e.g., the word “wīfmann” (woman) was used with masculine adjectives and pronouns; Modern English uses natural gender except for a few remnants like ship/she.))
Finally, Balhorn addresses the question “Just when did this construction enter the language and can we trace its development?” He reviews studies of Old English and Early Middle English that traced the loss of grammatical gender and the rise of natural gender in the language. Then he analyzes in more detail the OED, the Canterbury Tales, and another Middle English text (13th c), the Ancrene Wisse. Epicene ‘they’ was more frequent in the OED quotations and the Chaucer text than in the AW. However, the AW author still used grammatical gender, and the author was clearly aware of the semantic tension present with the masculine singular 3rd person (shown by the author’s sometimes matching male antecedents with female pronouns)–consistent with Balhorn’s theory.
Balhorn concludes that generic “they” prevails due to internal language changes, not external social changes, but he also states that social pressures affect the language as a whole and may therefore indirectly affect “they.” For example, corpus studies have shown that women were much less often the subject of discourse than men, so using a generic “he” wouldn’t have posed the same dilemma to Middle English writers as it does to Modern English writers. Still (pending “a more thorough and systematic search of generic antecedents and pronouns in Early Middle English”) it appears that the origins of this usage lie in the 14th century.
Historical text analysis isn’t my area of expertise, which is one reason I kept referring you to other sources. Any mistakes in the above are due to my hasty reread/typing. But Balhorn’s is the kind of research that I find convincing, particularly given the overall history of prescriptivism in English.
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November 21, 2009, 9:32 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
David, my point is that it may be possible to get around those pesky he/she/they pronouns in a lot of cases, without being exclusive or having to do the clunky he/she thing or use “they” if it grates on you.
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November 21, 2009, 10:13 pmMartha says:
Laura, you’re right. Some common strategies here.
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November 21, 2009, 10:20 pmLeo Marvin says:
Martha,
Anything that cogent must be a feminist trick.
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November 22, 2009, 1:02 amIt’s a Question of Who Is To Be Mistress. | Little Miss Attila says:
[...] That’s all. [...]
Martha says:
Leo Marvin: Drat! You cleverly deduced my radical intentions.
[Thank you for the kind words.]
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November 22, 2009, 1:31 amTracy W says:
David McCourt,
The two counter-examples I quoted were labelled “For modern-up dating”[sic, should have been “For modern up-dating]. I do not know what phrase the Navy nowadays uses to refer to its employees, both sailors and marines, but it might well have changed since revolutionary times. As for citizens, I don’t know of anyone nowadays who objects to being called a citizen.
The “every enemy will meet their match today” sounds to me as vivid and personal as your other example, and of course it has the merit of including any female enemies. It might conjure up to you an image of “one great reckoning” but your counter-example conjures up to me the evil Baroness escaping unscathed while her male minions are wiped out.
As for your recommended approach of “The hero will take his ammunition”, this is false if the hero happens to be female. Would you say “Mrs Smith took his ammunition...” meaning to refer to Mrs Smith taking her own ammunition? I’ve never heard this phrasing. (Of course these words are always slightly ambiguous: “Mr Smith took his ammunition...” could refer to Mr Smith taking Mr Black’s ammunition).
But the idea doesn’t appear to be reflected in actual written usage: the “Spurious Rule” was the mainstream usage, even when “every one” was used, rather than “every man”; the “singular they” looks to be a barely peripheral usage, unused by most authors.
I find this claim unconvincing given the long lists of the word “they” or “them” being used as a third person singular. You are free to dismiss all the counter-examples of course, but your grounds for doing so strike me as shaky. You have not proved your case that there was a rule against using the word “them” after “every”.
Eudora Welty I note was writing in the 20th century, and quite possibly believed like you that there was a rule forbidding the use of “them” or “their” after “every”.
I agree that there are some usage problems with the Spurious Rule, and instances where it just cannot sensibly be used – there is a hole in the language – but the examples you discuss are not where the usage problems lie.
Au contrarie, the usage problem does appear when dealing with gender. And I am really amazed that you think that it’s okay to say “The hero will take his ammunition..” when the hero might well be known to be female. (In this case the ideal answer to my ears would be to code so the right gender was used depending on how the character was set).
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November 22, 2009, 6:07 amDavid McCourt says:
Martha, you ask: “David McCourt, what type of evidence are you actually willing to consider?”
Well, Martha, I thought I had made that clear. I have asked, several times:
This thread is, after all, about EV’s contention that the “singular they” was “sanctioned by leading writers.”
You say that your “first comment summarized a source that cited many more writers than Austen, but you aren’t going to be persuaded by mere example.”
That is correct. I am not – who could be — persuaded by a source that cites the one or two stray instances that can be found in the entire body of a writer’s lifetime work, which is all that the first source you cited, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, does to support its broad assertion that “reference to everyone (or everybody) by they, their, them is . . . sanctioned by good writing . . . in important literature . . . from the 16th century to the present.”
I explained in some detail, above, that:
So now, Martha, you have provided citation to an article that you say provides the evidence I have been waiting for. You say the author of that article, Balhorn, “summarizes studies of present-day English, 18th century English, 19th century English, and OED quotations, all of which find a high incidence of “they” with grammatically singular, generic antecedents.”
So, it was with some interest that I paid $25 for the privilege of reading the Balhorn article, and seeing the summaries of the studies you mention. Here, in its entirety, is what Balhorn says about them:
That’s it. The same paltry, recycled citations from the usual suspects – one Eliot, check, one Swift, check, our old friend Thackeray (“Nobody prevents you, do they?”), check. So little on the subject exists in these “studies” that Balhorn is reduced to giving a prominent place, in quotes, to the same Shakespeare quote from Lucrece that I have previously noted, without bothering to mention that “themselves” was originally written as “himselve,” so that it barely counts as a real instance at all.
To be fair to the late Mr. Poutsma, he didn’t purport to be doing a “study” of the use of the “singular they” (which he says sometimes results in “harsh discrepancies”) by well known writers. He was writing a general book on English grammar “for the use of continental, especially Dutch, schoolchildren,” and understandably devotes only a few inconclusive sentences and citations to this issue.
I have to say I am disappointed, if not exactly shocked, but I thought when I plunked my $25 down that it would buy more than 50 words by Balhorn which add nothing new at all to the inquiry.
So, my question remains: just where is all the evidence that the “Spurious Rule” has actually been regarded as spurious by our best writers in centuries past, and that they embraced, or regularly employed, the “singular they” usage? On the strength of what has been offered here, Martha, the answer appears to be: there is no such evidence.
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November 22, 2009, 10:46 amMartha says:
David McCourt:
. . .that you will accept. It’s interesting that you don’t really quote from Balhorn “in its entirety” (your emphasis). Restore the words immediately preceding and following the quote, the passage reads:
This passage occurs in the middle of a 3-page discussion of epicene ‘they’ in Modern English. Maybe you were reading quickly? It’s a shame to pay $25 for an article and then miss so much of it.
Perhaps you needed to read that quickly because you apparently also read Sterling Leonard’s 1929 book The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage, 1700–1800, cited in the passage you quote, in order to comment intelligently on its scholarly merits. Your dismissive remarks about Leonard’s “paltry citations” don’t match my memory of it, but then I admit I have not read it recently.
But why not mention the six pages Balhorn devotes to the Canterbury Tales? Most people consider Chaucer to be one of our “leading writers.”
(For those playing at home, Balhorn found three factors that affect use of epicene ‘they’ in the CT: distance from the antecedent, antecedent sex, and notionally plural predication. re: distance: Possessive and reflexive pronouns were highly likely to appear within the antecedent clause domain, and these were, as predicted, highly likely to agree with their antecedent. Subject and object pronominal forms corefer only when outside the antecedent clause domain; when they did, these were, as predicted, more likely to use the epicene/plural form. Example: “Ye knowen wel that euery lusty knight, / that loueth paramours and hath his might / (Were it in Engelond or elliswhere / They wold hir thankes wilnen to be there.” [‘hir’ is a ME form of ‘their’]) re: pragmatics: When an antecedent is semantically male, male pronouns are used. But when semantics suggest plurality, plural pronouns are often used. Example: “Made euery wight to been in swich plesaunce / That al Monday iusten they and daunce.” [“every wight” = ME for “everyone” or “everybody”] )
But I have ridden my hobby horse too far. I’m not the one making the extraordinary claim that a perfectly normal English usage has always been considered aberrant, even before the “rule” was first formulated in the 18c–you are. Logically, you’re the one who should be supporting your claim, but the VC, for all its wonderful qualities, isn’t a good medium for a detailed examination of linguistic practice through the ages. So I’ll trust that anyone interested in scholarship about English knows where to find it, and leave things here.
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November 22, 2009, 12:45 pmDavid McCourt says:
Martha,
It would be simply decent of you to simply admit that the article you sent me to has next to nothing to say about usage of the “singular they” by well known writers in the years 1600–1900, which was what I was asking about.
The Canterbury Tales were written in Middle English — which has a reduced form of “singular they” derived from Anglo-Saxon — in the 1300s. What does this have to do with what was written by writers in Modern English, which has no such form, several hundred years later? (For what it’s worth here, Balhorn finds the use of “he/him/his” happens 82% of the time in Chaucer, while the Middle English “hem/hir(e)” appears 12% of the time, and an actual “they” appears 6% of the time, or in four instances).
The passage you quote concerning a “quantitative analysis of written English” has nothing to do with such writers, which is why I didn’t mention it. I’m not sure what such a blunt, mechanical analysis, without more, proves, in any event. Mr. Balhorn simply searched the OED for instances where “every one” precedes “they/them/their” by 10 words or less, and then compared them to instances where “every one” precedes “he/him/his” by the same. The work of no writer, well known or obscure, was analyzed. The search has no requirement that the words be in the same sentence, or even by the same speaker. So, a passage such as: “The Joneses thanked everyone and left. Later, as they walked home...” would show up as an instance of the use of the “singular they.” Even a passage saying, “No instance of Milton following the antecedent ‘every one’ with the pronoun ‘they’ can be found” would show up as an instance of the use of the “singular they.” This is evidence, of what? (Balhorn finds that “they” follows “every one” by 10 words anywhere from 9% to 38% of the time).
If the case for the acceptance and regular use of the “singular they” by well known authors is so solid, while all this dancing around? There must be some actual scholarship concerning well known authors, right? Why not just name names, and provide chapter and verse, as EV did with Austen?
I think I have asked, and you have failed to answer, often enough that we should call it a day. To each his own; or as you, perhaps Jane Austen, but not likely any other famous writer for 400 years, would say, “to each their own.”
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November 22, 2009, 1:57 pm