Language Log

It's often impossible to tell the difference between reduced him and reduced them. In particular, I can't tell whether John Edwards said "I just voted for him on Tuesday, so…" — meaning Barack Obama — or "I just voted for them on Tuesday, so…" — i.e. sex-neutral them, meaning either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, he's not saying which.

Mark Halperin can't tell either, but he asks the question ("Did Edwards Tip His Hand?", 5/9/2008). You should listen to the whole Q&A before you decide for yourself.

"Everyone knows each other", said someone on BBC Radio 4 this morning, speaking about some tight-knit community. And instantly I saw that this was the key to a definitive argument against the logic of the opponents of singular they. I wonder if I can make you see how awesomely beautiful the insight is.

The -s suffix on the present-tense verb knows tells us that the subject is morphosyntactically singular. That is, it counts as singular for purposes of subject-verb agreement. But each other, famously, requires a semantically plural subject. That is why They know each other is grammatical and *He knows each other is not. From this and nothing else it follows that semantic plurality and morphosyntactic singularity are compatible in English. No prescriptivist has suggested that there is something grammatically wrong with Everyone knows each other. But because of that, the logical objection to singular they just collapses. Everyone knows themselves has no grammatically relevant property that isn't already instantiated by Everyone knows each other.

In the Metro, a free newspaper that I often pick up in Edinburgh, there is an entertainment gossip page called Guilty Pleasures, which of course I never look at. Perhaps the most poisonous of the regular features is a couple of square inches, buried amongst the candid paparazzi shots of heiresses' breasts and film stars' bellies, under the title News from the Molehill, which I certainly never look at. It has a very particular and routinized syntactic form.

The piece always begins with a wh-phrase, usually of the form which + Adjective + Noun, the noun being something like actor, celebrity, TV personality, or singer. That wh-phrase is then used as the hook on which to hang a bizarre gossip item. Further references to the unknown individual with definite noun phrases are used to supply enough clues to get you guessing as to who it might be referring to. I quote one such item below in its entirety. (They are known in journalism as "blind items", Grant Barrett tells me.) I offer it for your scrutiny not so that you can start guessing who is being talked about, but because the piece, which unusually conceals the sex as well as the identity of the unknown gossip target, uses a striking series of singular they forms. In my judgment it goes outside the bounds of ordinary Standard English: the piece is basically ungrammatical for me.

Which paranoid celebrity has become so obsessed with their portrayal in the media they are going to extreme lengths to control their perception? The increasingly reclusive singer now personally rummages through their own bins in case they've thrown out anything that would give an insight into their private life…

A couple of days ago, Andrew Mueller at the Guardian tossed some bleeding gobbets into the crowd of ravening peevologists ("Linguistic pedants of the world unite", 4/14/2008). His point of departure:

For centuries, travellers have crossed America to explore it, conquer it, settle it, exploit it and study it. Now, a small but righteous crew are traversing America in order to edit it. Jeff Deck, and his friends at the Typo Eradication Advancement League (Teal), are spending three months driving from San Francisco, California, to Somerville, Massachusetts, on a mission to correct every misspelled, poorly punctuated, sloppily phrased item of signage they encounter en route. Equipped with marker pens, stickers and white-out, they are seeking to scourge America's landscape of floating apostrophes, logic-defying syntax and other manifestations of laziness and/or illiteracy.

A page at www.justice.gc.ca recommends that people drafting legislation should "consider using the third-person pronouns 'they', 'their', 'them', 'themselves' or 'theirs' to refer to a singular indefinite noun, to avoid the unnatural language that results from repeating the noun".

The page closes with an excellent set of references and quotations — the sources include the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage and the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Language Log is not cited (nor should it have been), but we may have had some indirect influence, perhaps by providing a theological argument that retains some force even in a secular society like Canada's, or perhaps by offering protection against the intemperate irrationality that these issues sometimes provoke.