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Actually, on reflection, you might want to skip it until you've had breakfast. An interesting passage, for reference.
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Fridge and Jack have opened up a very interesting question, that of legitimacy. Jack believes that the usage of "they" as a singular, despite precedence, is fundamentally not legitimate, as it conflicts with the standard usage of the word, and thus creates grammatical confusion. Fridge seems to be arguing that popular usage creates legitimacy (although I think the dialect thing is a bit of a red herring....ooooh - unless! Remind me of that in a second, brain).
Certainly, popular usage creates *comprehensibility*, and the major thing that singular "they" has going for it is that most people recognise it. This is certainly where I find my locus of difficulty. I don't much like "they" on a purely aesthetic level - over any length of paragraph, it becomes gratingly artificial, and, as Jack seems to suggest, if you are using "they" as a singular, you really have to start saying "they is/was/does" to maintain clinguistic consistency - rather as "fish" can be singular or plural, but demands grammatical agreement. What Fridge and others are advancing is in fact not "singular they" but "plural they with singular meaning", just as at the moment, to quote myself quoting Thomson and Martinet (hee!):
They is used as subject only. They can mean "people":
they say = people say, it is said
They say it is going to be a cold winter.
They can also mean "the authority concerned", i.e. the government/local council/one's employers/the police etc.
they want to make this a one-way street
Now, Merriam-Webster, as of about 1973, I think, admitted the possibility of the notional plural, which would make "they" with a plural usage permissible (at least if you are American, and keen on Merriam and Webster) after "everyone", "everybody", and a finitude of other, similar terms - thus "everybody is free to do what they want" good, "the passenger is free to do what they want" not, but instead "the passenger is free to do what they wants", which shows up the danger of appropriating an existing term.
So, question 1 is whether "they" can be adopted with plural grammar but singular menaing, question 2 probably being whether "they" with sinuglar usage is too ugly and confusing to live (my vote? A big yes). "They" with plural grammar but singular usage may, if you are not too fussy about such things, work as a generic singular, but in certain situations may be confusing or inappropriate; in particular in the case of long passages dealing with multiple uses of "they", and specific individuals with ambiguous or non-standard gender alignment. Whether people with ambiguous or non-standard gender alignment need their own pronoun (Uncle Friedrich's link above suggests that ze/hir is no good as a gender-neutral generic because it has come to describe people of a or n-s gender, which I am not sure is in itself a problem, as, as has been pointed out, confusing the use of the generic with the use of an epicene pronoun describing a person of a or n-s gender is unlikely to crop up too often and be fairly clear when it does).
Personally, I tend to think that rules of grammar are there to safeguard comprehensibility rather than to function as solids. Thus, as I would not use casual abbreviation through apostrophe in formal text, I would probably also steer away from plural they with singular meaning, because it seems inappropriate, as would, conveniently enough, y'all, so didn't I and I could care less. This may be because of my own ingrained assumption that formal text should not be dialectic, or rather should function in a particular dialect, that of formal English. I might use it in informal text, or in speech, where I will also at times use bits of the dialect of my childhood in the East Midlands. So, it functions, as Fridge suggests, as dialect, but in that case should presumably be bound by the same rules as dialect.
On the other hand, maybe the epicene pronoun is actually designed as a piece of dialect, or more correctly as a piece of "professional language". That is, in the same way that some trading guilds used to have a special dialect designed to make overheard conversations more difficult to eavesdrop, and a doctor, lawyer, engineer or sub-editor (say) will have access to and need of a number of specialised terms. Possibly the epicene pronoun is a specialised term for people working in areas where gender needs either to be elided or suspended a lot; gender theory, trans theory, other related disciplines. However, once the tool is in the language, it does seem liek quite a handy tool to have, certainly for people of a or n-s gender, and arguably as a convenient generic singular.
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