Language Log

Here's a very nice case of modern sex-neutral pronoun-choice style, with the unusual feature that the antecedent for the two occurrences of singular they (which prescriptivsts hate so much) is not only a definite noun phrase, but a definite noun phrase denoting a unique individual. The sentence comes from a Buzzfeed listicle drawn from "Shit Academics Say" (@AcademicsSay) on Twitter. I underline the antecedent and the two pronouns:

We wish to thank Reviewer 2 for their critical feedback & sincerely apologize for not having written the manuscript they would have written.

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Today's Questionable Content:

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When the delightfully cute UK Olympic diving star Tom Daley decided to come out as bisexual, he made a statement (see this news report) with a charmingly clever use of singular they:

"In spring this year my life changed massively when I met someone, and they make me feel so happy, so safe and everything just feels great," Daley said. "That someone is a guy."

His use of "they" for the first reference to his new romantic interest has "someone" as its antecedent, and rather than being a bound variable semantically (as in Everyone should look after their own gear), it's just a free pronoun meaning "he or she, as the context may dictate". He could have used he, as typical conservative usage advice books would have insisted. Except that it would have utterly ruined his rhetorical design.

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Professor Heinz Giegerich has pointed out to me that in the wake of Pope Benedict's resignation of his position at least two BBC reporters have been referring to the next pope, whoever that might be, using singular they. I don't have specific word-for-word quotations, but (apparently) reporters have been using phrases like The next pope will find that they…, or Anyone who expects the cardinals to elect them, and so on. Further evidence (to be added to evidence like the case of "They are a prophet") that singular they is not motivated solely or necessarily by ignorance or indecision about which gender is appropriate. The next pope, whoever they may be, will surely be a man, so the pronoun he would be appropriate and unobjectionable. But we have no idea which man, so singular they also feels entirely appropriate, contrary to what all the dumb usage pontificators say.

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Slate has an article lambasting Sweden's growing enthusiasm for total gender neutrality, and it raises the profile of a move, actually originating in the mid 1960s, to get hen established as a new pronoun meaning "he/she/it", eliminating the forced choice between han "he" and hon "she".

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From the first comment on Paul Krugman's blog post "Rat Race America", 9/19/2010, a rare first-person singular their:

I'm a tech entrepreneur who works their brains out and has had some success for myself and my investors. I live among hedge fund guys and VC's who take home $1m/year +.

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Bob Ladd just got a message requesting an academic reference letter for someone who I will refer to as Gerald Black. I am concealing his name, but not his gender: he is male, and his real name couldn't leave you in any doubt about that. Further concealing the identity of the innocent, let me say that he is applying for a job at a university that I will refer to as the University of Penzance (there isn't one), in the Department of Criminology (that isn't the real field; all of this secrecy is beside the point, but you will see the point in a minute). The message begins:

Dr Gerald Black has applied for a position of Lecturer in the Department of Criminology at the University of Penzance. I would be grateful if you could provide a reference on their suitability for this post.

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I'm a fan of David Pogue's tech reviews in the NYT, but his recent review of David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World has me wondering whether I care much for his book reviews. For example, Pogue writes:

Kirkpatrick's writing is low-key but also workmanlike, and punctuated by jarring grammatical constructions ("Everybody carried their stuff themselves"; "every Thefacebook user had their own public bulletin board"). Ouch.

Two examples, and both involve singular they? Not much variety there, which indicates to me that there's probably not much variety in the constructions Pogue finds jarring in the book. So why even mention this? It's clear that Pogue has plenty of other justifiable reasons to dislike the book; this comment about grammar seems entirely unnecessary — and, as has been discussed here on Language Log so many times that it's not worth trying to compile a list of links (but see the Wikipedia page on the subject), singular they is just not that big of a deal.

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Here is Sandy Brindley, of Rape Crisis Scotland, quoted (in the Metro newspaper, 29 June 2010), talking about an advertisement her organization has published:

The advert has been designed to shake out ingrained prejudices many Scots have towards women who have been raped. Even though people believe they wouldn't judge a rape victim by what they wear, how drunk they were, or if they had been flirting, they often do.

Now, you're a Language Log reader; you've probably read about singular they and the prescriptivist prejudice against it. What do we want to say about the use of pronouns in the second sentence in this quotation?

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Edward Wyatt ("Creators of ‘Lost’ Say the GPS Unit Is Plugged In", NYT 1/28/2010) quotes Damon Lindelof, an executive producer of Lost, exploring the use of they as an indefinite singular pronoun in free variation with he:

“There’s an inherent process when you’re ending something to sort of be thinking about the beginning,” Mr. Lindelof said. “One of the things that I think we are trying to do — all of us, the actors and the writers as well, in the sixth season — is to show the audience the before,” as well as the after.

Therefore episodes in the final season will continue to provide plenty of back story. That way viewers “have some sense of, ‘Oh, this is what he used to be and who they are now,’ ” Mr. Lindelof added. “So you really get a sense of how far that person’s come.”

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Over on ADS-L, Larry Horn read his NYT carefully:

One additional highlight of the Virginia Heffernan guido/guidette piece in today's N. Y. Times Magazine section is a nice example of a plural pronoun with singular sex-known but indefinite antecedent, a phenomenon we've discussed in the past. Here's Sammi Sweetheart, describing the role she plays in the MTV Reality show, "Jersey Shore", as quoted by Heffernan

"A Guidette takes really good care of themselves, has pretty hair, cakes on makeup, has tan skin, wears the hottest heels."

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A nice example of the way singular they works was overlooked (like health care, the economy, and everything else in the past week of "racial politics") during the brouhaha over President Obama's press conference remarks about the arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts of Professor Henry Louis Gates. Obama said:

. . . the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.

Why would he use they and their, when the antecedent, somebody, is syntactically singular, and we actually know that the somebody he is talking about in this case was Professor Henry Louis Gates, who is male? Why did he not say proof that he was in his own home?

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The good folks over at Gmail have been busy lately, rolling out several new features of note over the past several weeks. I've recently used their new automatic message translation feature to render a hilarious translation into English of a Spanish message that my father recently sent, and I thought about blogging about that first until I even more recently had the opportunity to test their new mail and contact importing feature. You might think that this is less language-related for this blog, but think again. (And feel free to add your funny message translations in the comments — you know you want to.)

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