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Non-gender-specific third persons

Wednesday, 21 November 2007

He or she, it or they? Call me old-fashioned but I find a lot of attempts to write or speak in gender-neutral language tend to range between the ugly and the comical. Recently I saw "... and if anyone transgress this vow, may the wrathful deity split his or her head into seven pieces!". But there is no need for it!

I was brought up to look down on the use of "they" as a non-specific pronoun. And while some of the attempts to be gender-neutral may be too ugly for me to be willing to use, I'm well aware that we really want and need to use gender-non-specific language much more these days than we did decades ago. The use of "they" does the job, but it is deprecated as "uneducated".

But hey! They fooled us again! Just like the grammarians tried to tell us that split infinitives were un-English (by which they really meant "unlike Latin), they tried to tell us that the "singular they" is un-English. Despite having been used since at least the late 1300s, by such writers as Jane Austen: Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, the King James Bible, The Spectator, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Fielding, Maria Edgeworth, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans], Charles Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, W. H. Auden, Lord Dunsany, George Orwell, and C. S. Lewis.

Deprecated starting in the late 18th or early 19th century, the loss of a gender-non-specific pronoun has been a problem ever since. It's time we brought it back. So isn't it time to

bring they back!

The information above is based on this site

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