Comments on: Innovation, rules, and regulation

By: David J. Littleboy

David J. Littleboy — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 15:18:19 +0000

Rubrick:
"Changing it to "whom" would have A) made it a terrible song, and B) been rather disrespectful to Bo Diddley, who wrote it."

Tom Rush, being a Harvey, would occassionally toss in "Whom do you love" a time or two as a joke. It did make it a terrible song.

By: Mark F.

Mark F. — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 18:55:08 +0000

I'm still not convinced the usage evidence is fine-grained enough to rule out the possibility that there is a natural tendency (however that may be defined) against singular they in more formal registers. I think to make the question meaningful you have to look at the language in the era before there were style guides prohibiting it, and I know that has been done. But, for instance, it seems to be used quite rarely in the KJV; maybe only once, if I understood and remember a post on the topic correctly.

[(myl) Not sure about your understanding, but your memory is not right.]

That proves the usage was alive at the time, but it's also at least consistent with the possibility that there was some discomfort with it.

Right now, given how much formal prose has been published in which it was avoided, I'd be leery of using it a whole lot in something like a grant proposal. Sometimes you want to avoid having too informal a vibe.

By: Ken Brown

Ken Brown — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 02:36:19 +0000

I sometimes use "they" for a person of known gender, and I think I have all my life. Others around me do as well. It doesn't seem strange to me at all. Completly natural to me.

For what its worth I was born in Brighton in the south-east of England in the 1950s, I now live in South London, and I'm a native speaker of what I don't like calling "Estuary English".

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 20:07:39 +0000

I've never seen they used for "a specific person of known gender".

I will sometimes do exactly that when I wish to avoid calling attention to someone's gender (because I believe it is both irrelevant and the awareness of that information is fraught in that particular context).

By: Ellen K.

Ellen K. — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 17:15:54 +0000

I've sometimes seen "they" used when talking about an individual where the speaker knows who it is, including gender, but is talking about them in a generic way. [(myl) See e.g. "They are a prophet", 10/21/2004; or "Singular they trudges on", 1/24/2010.]

By: Dave K

Dave K — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 14:20:23 +0000

@John Roth:
I've never seen they used for "a specific person of known gender". What it is used for frequently is refering to a person whose gender isn't known or refering to an indefinite person whose gender could be either: "a doctor", "a teacher", "a child", etc.

By: John Roth

John Roth — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 23:55:51 +0000

I think I wasn't clear about my point: the grammatical antecedent is indeed "someone." This isn't in dispute. However, what MWCDEU calls the notional antecedent is earlier since someone is a pronoun that also has to agree with its antecedent. To quote the end of the several page discussion of they in MWCDEU (p 735ff.) (errors in transcription are mine): "They, their, them are used in both literature and general writing to refer to singular nouns when those nouns have some notion of plurality about them. [Example from Shaw bypassed.] Notional agreement is in control, and its dictates must be followed." The point I was trying to make is that notional plurality is established by "a tiny proportion of seriously mentally ill people." It comes from the more general discourse frame, not from the specific grammar that says "someone" is the antecedent which must match in number. To quote MWCEDU again: "As most commentors note, the traditional pronoun for each of these cases is the masculine third person singular: he, his, him. This tradition goes back to the 18th-century grammarians, who boxed themselves into the position that the indefinite pronouns must always be singular." p.734, col 2. What Mirriam-Webster seems to be saying here (although they don't quite get there) is that the indefinite pronouns, including someone, actually have indefinite number as well as indefinite gender, regardless of the prescription that they must be singular. Again to quote: "The use of the plural pronouns to refer to indefinite pronouns--- anyone, each, everyone, nobody, somebody, etc. --- results from the concurrence of two forces: notional agreement (the indefinite pronouns are usually plural in implication) and the lack of sexual identification that indefinite pronouns share with they, their, them." This entire discussion, of course, doesn't have anything to do with the habit I've seen of using they to refer to a specific person of known gender. That's a separate issue, and I'm firmly with the prescriptivist camp on that one.

By: John Walden

John Walden — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 16:58:03 +0000

Idealist prescriptivists that say "It should be thus because it would be better if it was" (although they'd say "were", I suppose) are being more honest than ones that want to return to an imagined dreamtime when one of their strictures was adhered to, although it wasn't really of course.

Is there a prescriptivist peeve that can in fact claim ancient precedent? Was "can" once not used for asking permission, or was the nonsense of "I shall drown and nobody will save me" ever part of real usage? Crystal seems to suggest the second was a made-up rule in the 17th century.

http://www.davidcrystal.com/DC_articles/English96.pdf

[(myl) Peeving about (putatively) new coinages is often (though not always) accurate. See here for a couple of examples where the deprecated usage really was new, and here for some examples in the other direction.

As for can used to indicate permission, the OED's earliest citation is Tennyson in 1879.]

By: Breffni

Breffni — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 15:48:45 +0000

LDavidH:

"amn't I" is quite a mouthful

As usual, that depends on whether you're used to it. 'Amn't I' (two syllables in 'amn't') is firmly part of my own Irish English dialect, and in fact I remember as a child being corrected by my parents when I said 'aren't I'. I don't think I learned until adulthood that 'aren't I' was a prescriptive norm elsewhere.

By: Geoff Nathan

Geoff Nathan — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 12:14:37 +0000

Mark (and others), you might be interested in the work of Rudi Keller, who has written at least two books on a Hayekian view of language change (specifically calling language a system that is a result of human intentions, but not of human design). He's at Dusseldorf:

Keller, Rudi. 1994. On Language Change: The Invisible Hand in Language (trans) B. Nerlich. London ; New York: Routledge.

By: LDavidH

LDavidH — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 10:27:35 +0000

Yes, as an ESL speaker, I remember being very surprised when learning that you say "aren't I" - it seemed so arbitrary. Although "amn't I" is quite a mouthful…

By: The Ridger

The Ridger — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 06:55:08 +0000

Also, besides singular "you are", non-subject/verb-agreement never seems to bother those who say things like "aren't I?" And sure, that's the solution to a different problem (the taboo "ain't") but it results in a prescribed lack of agreement…

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 05:56:50 +0000

@marie-lucie, at the risk of repeating observations that have appeared here before, the frightening thing about your comment is that there's a non-negligible probability that someone, somewhere will read it and decide that you've revealed some usages which must be corrected.

By: marie-lucie

marie-lucie — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 04:19:03 +0000

Note these common ways of referring to an unidentified person: (1) Someone phoned and asked for you. - Who was it? (2) Someone phoned from your office. - What did they say? (3) I'll have him/her phone you back. - Who was that? (1) uses non-human it, (2) uses singular they, and (3) uses all-purpose that, yet no one seems to object to (1) and (2). As possible alternatives, "he or she" in (1) and (2) would be at best extremely awkward, and impossible (I think) in (3). "The person" would sound somewhat stilted, a deliberate attempt to avoid a pronoun.

By: Julie

Julie — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 02:41:22 +0000

Steve: I think most people who use "singular they" use it because it sounds natural to them. I use it because my parents use it, and my grandparents (the American ones) used it. It's that simple. A university education led to some minor changes in my speech, but that isn't one of them.