Job Discussion Forums

[Sashadroogie]

A quick language question for posters, one which cropped up recently in my classroom.

There was a sentence in a vocabulary exercise - 'The baby enjoys splashing in its bath.' One of the learners asked about the use of its. "Why not use their if we do not know the gender of the person in question?" As in the sentence, 'Oh look! Someone is climbing that tall tree. Oh no they have fallen!'

I was not sure immediately, but my response was that using they/their for gender-neutral statements is more typical when there is some sort of physical distance involved, thus obscuring gender, and also for abstract and general cases, where we do not know which people are involved specifically. For the baby, and also for animals, we know exactly which individual in in questions, we have more proximity, but we still do not know the gender, thus leading us to use it and its.

What says the community?

[johntpartee]

I saw something somewhere a long time ago that "he/him/his" could be used if the gender was not known or it was a heterogenous group, i.e., "every student should bring his book to class".

[Sashadroogie]

No, no, no, Cole. That won't do these days. You'll get a hammering for such sexism! Tsk tsk! Tear out that page from the book and burn it. Then scatter the ashes over the sea's rip-tide. Hic!

[johntpartee]

I was gonna say something along the lines of how it would be a faux pas nowadays, but.....

P.S. I'm not Cole.

[HLJHLJ]

The student enjoys their class.
The teacher was eating their meal.

I wouldn't use 'its' in either of those sentences, but I would in yours. I don't know why though. The whole gender neutral thing still sounds clumsy to me though. I wonder if someone who has been raised on it would use it differently.

[nomad soul]

My preference: The baby enjoys splashing in the bath.

[Sashadroogie]

Oh, yeah, you're not Cole. You're John. Must have had one too many nips between meals: I'm confusing my posts and posters... Hic!

[Sashadroogie]

The student enjoys ____ meal. A good example, but everything sounds clumsy there, to me at least.

Is it down to some sort of lexical patterning, I wonder. Words like 'student' or 'teacher' are normally followed by 'his' or 'her'. Whereas 'baby' or 'person' are not. Do we ascribe gender to the former, but not the latter?

This is too taxing to be contemplated without another little drink...

[nomad soul]

[Sashadroogie]

Interesting. Wives used to be considered property too, but gender would have been clear. Back then, at least. Hard to know these days.

[nomad soul]

The perception of children as property is definitely culture based but also continues to be legally defined as such in some countries.

I particularly notice when native English speakers use its/it when referring to a baby or young child. It seems very strange as well as archaic to me, especially when they're speaking about their own child.

Give the baby its bottle.

Yet...
Give your sister her bottle.

[johnslat]

Dear Sasha,

This is a bit off-topic, and I'm sure you're familiar with what I'm about to post. However, it may be new to a few others.

"Singular �they� and the many reasons why it�s correct

Suppose you were reading and came to the following line:

�She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes.�

Would you �
(a) continue reading, because that�s a perfectly acceptable sentence, or
(b) throw a tantrum and insist that the author is an imbecile speeding the wholesale destruction of the English language?

If you�re a regular reader of this blog, you�re probably answering (a). If you�re answering (b), I regret to inform you that you hate the writing of C. S. Lewis.

And if you�re the sort to answer (b), the sort of person who rages at the alleged grammatical buffoonery of your fellows, I�m sure it�s because you think you�re doing us all a favor, and that your condescending tone is justified because: first, you�re being helpful regardless of the tone you�re using; second, people only learn through negative conditioning, and so it is your duty, however unpleasant, to rub their noses in it to keep them from going on doing it; third, only a truly illiterate mouth-breather would be so moronic as to make such a mistake, and such imbeciles are below contempt and probably don�t even realize that you�re condescending to them anyway; and fourth, given the Heruclean effort you�ve put into learning the English language as impeccably as you did, it�s really only fair that you get to be a little self-satisfied and perhaps even gloat a smidge."

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/

Regards,
John

[coledavis]

Hello. I am the original Cole. I would prefer to be called the one and only Cole but for the likely copyright problems relating to porn movies. Howsoever, I would like to support the original posting. Because I'm old and crusty.

[spiral78]

In some Slavic languages, the noun for baby is neuter (neither masculine nor feminine) and so the pronouns used to refer to babies are also neuter.
They're all 'it' s.

[johnslat]

Personally, I'd use "it" with a baby only if I was unsure of its gender.

Oops - let me correct myself:

Congratulations - it's a boy.

http://www.crballoonsetc.com/images/picture_1_3.gif

English - gotta love it

Regards,
John