Annals of singular "themselves"
« previous post | next post »
Geoff Hackelford, "Olympic Golf: (Some) 'Powers-That-Be-Whiffed'", 5/6/2016:
But as Marika Washchyshyn writes for Golf, the women's side has a very different view, with not a single player declaring themselves out in spite of the health scare […]
Ron Irving, who sent in the link, notes that themselves is used to refer to an individual (if generic) woman, and adds that "a few years back I would have stared at this sentence in disbelief".
Riikka said,
May 7, 2016 @ 12:19 pm
If you yourself can write how you and your friend got yourselves in trouble, why can't these women themselves come up with a way for a player to declare themself something something something?
Just wondering.
[(myl) I'm entirely in favor of they/them/their/themselves in such cases; and usages of this type have a long history, as discussed e.g. in "Linguistic reaction at the New Yorker", 3/8/2016. But I think that Ron Irving is right that such examples are spreading — and the point, I guess, is that people who used to find them jarring are getting used to them.]
Thorin said,
May 7, 2016 @ 12:25 pm
Maybe this is a Midwest thing, because my spoken English is very heavily influenced by me being a Michigan boy, and that sentence makes perfect sense to me. It could be because I was born in 1990, but using "themselves" in this context has been in standard use where I'm from for as long as I can remember. Sometimes I'm surprised it's a cause for confusion at all.
Jay Sekora said,
May 7, 2016 @ 12:52 pm
I’d say this with “themself”, personally. In this case I think “themselves” is primed a bit because we’re talking about lots of people each individually not making a decision to declare {themself,themselves,herself} out, so plurality seems relevant. Reversing the sense, you might say “They all declared themselves out.”
I wonder if there was a period in English history where some people were prescribing “yourselves” even in the singular, considering “you” grammatically plural even when semantically singular. (There certainly was a time when fuddy-duddies were railing against the singular “you” altogether.)
M.N. said,
May 7, 2016 @ 12:54 pm
I'm from New York, born in 1989, and 'themself' sounds more natural to me in this case than 'themselves'. However, 'themselves' would be just plain bad, to my ear, if the antecedent were something like 'every player' or 'some player'. With 'no(t a single) player', it sounds better to me for some reason.
Guy said,
May 7, 2016 @ 1:27 pm
"a few years back I would have stared at this sentence in disbelief"
It seems to me not meaningfully different than the Shakespeare example that has already been pointed out here, and which I consider to be a good example of the situation where singular they has pretty much always been used. I mean, it's notable in that it shows that singular they doesn't have to have gender ambiguity, but hasn't that always been true? Certain antecedents like "no one" and "each" tend to encourage singular they.
[(myl) I agree with your generalization. But the prescriptive reaction to singular they dates from (or at least gathered strength in) the late 19th century, and so there has been a period of 100 years or so where students were taught that the usage was wrong, and copy editors generally suppressed it.
And for reasons that I don't entirely understand, people who believe in such prescriptive rules often don't notice violations in esteemed antique works. For example, people who have swallowed the dictum that you shouldn't start a sentence with a conjunction aren't shocked by the frequent violation of this rule in the King James bible.
So it's a sign of progress that someone now hardly notices a phrase like "not a single player declaring themselves out", when that same person would have found it shocking a few years ago.]
Irina said,
May 7, 2016 @ 2:03 pm
Yes, "themself" for me too, like singular "yourself" and plural "yourselves".
Sky Onosson said,
May 7, 2016 @ 5:16 pm
For me, themselves is decidedly preferable to themself in the cited example. I think I feel like Thorin does, and I'm two decades older and further northwest (Manitoba).
David Morris said,
May 7, 2016 @ 6:02 pm
Is there any reason we can't call women golfers 'she …'?
Guy said,
May 7, 2016 @ 6:24 pm
@David Morris
I'm not sure I understand what motivates your question. It's not obvious to me why anyone would have a problem with "herself" in this context, but many native English speakers would find "themself" or "themselves" more natural, and be more likely to produce one of those pronouns automatically if speaking without consciously thinking about their pronoun choice, given that the antecedent does not refer to to a definite person but is instead a sort of variable being quantified over to form what was known in Aristotelian logic as an "E" type proposition.
Guy said,
May 7, 2016 @ 7:32 pm
@Jay Sekora
According to the OED, "yourself" with plural reference antedates "yourselves", and the form "yourselves" only starts to appear around the same time "you" began to be used with singular reference.
AntC said,
May 7, 2016 @ 9:27 pm
I noted singular their in The whistleblower behind the Panama Papers broke their silence …, e.g. here: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/may/06/panama-papers-source-breaks-silence-over-scale-of-injustices.
I suppose this is partly to protect their anonymity even as to gender. Nevertheless it grated a little; despite my trying to retrain my brain on LL's frequent examples.
Jay Sekora said,
May 7, 2016 @ 9:30 pm
@Guy
Ooh, thank you for that! I didn’t realize that “-selves” for the plural forms wouldn’t have been there from the beginning along with “-self”. (So presumably “ourself” with plural referent too?)
Guy said,
May 7, 2016 @ 10:03 pm
@Jay Sekora
I found it surprising, too. I found a paradigm for "self" in Old English and apparently the plural forms didn't have the "s" that appeared in many Old English plurals that eventually became the regular plural suffix, and so the form "selves" would appear to be the result of regularization.
Jerry Friedman said,
May 7, 2016 @ 10:03 pm
Regardless of what motivated David Morris's question, I'm curious about whether the preference some people have for "themself" or "themselves" in these situations has reached the point where "herself" sounds wrong. "…the women's side has a very different view, with not a single player declaring herself out in spite of the health scare"?
Guy said,
May 7, 2016 @ 10:16 pm
Oh, it's because "self" was apparently an adjective, whose plural forms didn't have "s" in them. Reading text alongside tables is sometimes helpful.
Guy said,
May 7, 2016 @ 10:32 pm
@Jay Sekora
And yes, relying on the OED again and what the etymology appears to be, "ourself" apparently also antedates "ourselves", and "themself" antedates "themselves", despite what your spell-checker might have to say about "themself".
@Jerry Friedman
Reading, I doubt I would notice "herself" in this context, though of course it's impossible for me to verify that. But right now with my attention focused on it, "herself" feels a little stiff and formal. I doubt that I would produce it myself in ordinary speech. But of course my expectations about what I do and what I actually do are two different things.
Bob Ladd said,
May 8, 2016 @ 2:45 am
Possibly relevant data point: on p. 60 of his new book on "Uptalk", Paul Warren describes a proposal about the meaning of uptalk as "allowing the listener to mark herself as recipient of the information being imparted by the speaker, and indicating that the speaker intends to continue their turn". When I read this I assumed it was simply a badly copy-edited way of avoiding default masculine pronouns: surely if he deliberately used herself in the first half of the sentence, it would make sense to continue with her in the second half. But after reading this post, another possibility occurs to me: what Warren originally wrote was themselves and their, then (presumably because he shares some of the reactions to singular themselves recorded in the comments above) decided against themselves without noticing that he should have got rid of their at the same time.
Mr Punch said,
May 8, 2016 @ 7:26 am
I find it odd that "herself" is not used here – the reference is explicitly feminine as opposed to masculine ("the women's side") and emphatically singular ("a single player"). Can we conclude that "herself" is on its way out, if not already gone?
Jerry Friedman said,
May 8, 2016 @ 9:24 am
Guy: Thanks, that's the kind of information I was looking for.
Bob Ladd: Is it conceivable that since "herself" refers to the speaker and "their" to the listener, Warren deliberately used different persons for the pronouns?
Mr Punch: Not that I'm anything like an expert, but I'll bet "herself" and "himself" are probably on their way out in these quantified contexts. I don't thing they're in any danger in sentences such as "Ms. Doe decided to do it herself, since there was little risk that she would hurt herself."
John Roth said,
May 8, 2016 @ 1:15 pm
I'd go with themselves rather than themself because, as far as I'm concerned, the context is plural. My spellchecker seems to agree: it marks themself as a misspelling.
That said, though, I'd prefer a singular epicine pronoun. In contexts where it's at least marginally acceptable, I'd write that fragment as "declaring cimself out," using ce, cim, cis, cimself as the pronoun in question (soft c).
Thanks for the note on the entemology: now that I look at the word closely it's got two plural markers: f -> v and -es.
Brett said,
May 8, 2016 @ 1:53 pm
@Jerry Friedman: For me, "herself" or "themself" is fine, but "themselves" is questionable. (I found the sentence quite confusing the first time I read it, but I think that was only due in small part to the reflexive pronoun choice.)
Guy said,
May 8, 2016 @ 1:56 pm
@John Roth
Most spellcheckers won't recognize "themself" as a valid word at all. It has nothing to do with the context. But for purposes of verb agreement, the antecedent is definitely singular: in present tense we would have "not a single player declares" not "not a single declare". Of course, verb agreement number doesn't always correspond to pronoun agreement number because of semantic override. "When my family [visits/*visit] [they always bring/#it always brings] gifts." (The asterisk marks a judgment for standard AmEng, I believe "visit" would be acceptable in, say, the UK).
On f->v, I'm actually not sure around what time the [f/v] (and [θ/ð] etc.) allophony in these contexts evolved into a phonemic contrast. Can anyone enlighten me on this?
Ralph J Hickok said,
May 8, 2016 @ 2:28 pm
I still stare at this sentence in disbelief.
Andrew (not the same one) said,
May 8, 2016 @ 4:49 pm
To me:
a. Generalising singular 'they' has always been legitimate.
b. The reflexive form of 'they' has always been 'themselves'. Until a couple of years ago I had no idea 'themself' existed.
c. When 'they' is used of named or precisely specified individuals ('Jo' or 'the mayor'), it may be necessary to say 'themself'. It still feels a bit unnatural, but then this use of 'they' also feels a bit unnatural; but not actually wrong because of that.
d. Whenever there is an element of generalisation, I would still use 'themselves.
Is there an actual historic use of 'themself'? Are there people for whom 'themself' is a part of the language whose existence they have never doubted?
Jerry Friedman said,
May 8, 2016 @ 11:55 pm
Brett: Thanks.
cs said,
May 9, 2016 @ 8:27 am
I think "themselves" (or "themself") works better then "herself" in the quoted sentence because it is contrasting the actions of female golfers with the actions of male golfers. In other words "declaring themselves out" is meant to be taken as something that male players are doing, but female players are not doing.
Guy said,
May 9, 2016 @ 10:56 am
@Andrew (not the same one)
"Themself" is a natural part of my lexicon. I was actually surprised as a child when I first discovered it wasn't listed in most dictionaries. (I was also disappointed because I had thought that the word "themself" would disprove the "they is always plural" stuff I was sure my English teacher was wrong about based on my native intuition)
As I noted above, the form "themself" is actually older than "themselves", which displaced the older form, so it seems entirely possible that people who retain "themself" for some contexts do so as part of an unbroken lineage back to the time before the form "themselves" existed.
BZ said,
May 9, 2016 @ 12:01 pm
I would assume "herself" is not used because the antecedent is "player" which is not gendered. I would expect the frequency of such usage to be inversely proportional with the difficulty of finding the gender of the antecedent (e.g. I would refer to a member of the group "past presidents of the United States" as "they" and not "he". If the previous sentence were "one of the women stood up", I would refer to her as "she".)
Jerry Friedman said,
May 9, 2016 @ 12:02 pm
cs: Thanks for the interesting comment.
Chas Belov said,
May 13, 2016 @ 1:31 am
Singular "themselves" grates on me.
I use singular "themself."
In the example given, I don't think of "herself" so much as wrong as unnecessary.