Re: New Front Desk members
On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 10:06:01AM -0500, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> On Monday 31 January 2005 03:43 am, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > I wonder how many native speakers would assume "they" to refer to an
> > unknown number of unknown elements when used as an indefinite pronoum?
> > That seems to be the real question here.
> Whatever its merits in formal writing, "they" is commonly used
> colloquially > (at least around here) as a gender-neutral
> substitute for "he" or "she".
As for Henrique's point - if it doesn't make sense to you, that's
because you were taught English wrong. Which is ok, I was taught
wrong too. Back in the seventies, I was taught that you don't end a
sentence with a preposition, that you don't split an infinitive, and
that you don't use "they" as a singular pronoun. (Oh, and you don't
play fast-and-loose with adverbs like I did in the first sentences of
this paragraph.) All of those rules are now considered false,
because, even though they were jammed down the throats of
schoolchildren for nearly two centuries, they never, ever took.
Back in the seventies, they opened up a brand-new subway here (BART),
and in the subway stations, they had signs saying, "Each passenger
must have their own ticket." This line made it all the way through an
entire bureaucracy without anyone noticing it was "wrong". And the
reason nobody noticed was that that's the way native speakers speak.
My high-school English teacher organized a protest, and got the signs
"fixed", and I was actually pretty proud of him at the time, because I
didn't realize (yet) that he was trying to enforce an invalid and
misguided rule.
And yet, the use of the singular "they" does still make people
uncomfortable. Possibly (probably) because it was and is so much more
widespread and obvious than the sentences that end with prepositions
or the split infintives, and thus it was something that people
thought they could "correct" (like my high-school English teacher).
But in any case, prejudice against the singular "they" is widespread
enough that it's usage cannot be consider better than colloquial, as
Daniel notes. Unfortunately, the formally "correct" alternative -
using "he" - also makes people uncomfortable (as we see from the
current debate). So there's really no way to win here.
Now, I try to stick with "he" in my formal writing, but generally use
"they" in my informal writings. As a project, though, I think we
should stay out of the debate, and leave it up to the individual
author(s). Because there really is no "right" answer here.
--
Chris Waters | Pneumonoultra- osis is too long
xtifr@debian.org | microscopicsilico- to fit into a single
or xtifr@speakeasy.net | volcaniconi- standalone haiku
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