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[nomad soul]

‘They,’ the Singular Pronoun, Gets Popular
By Ben Zimmer, Wall Street Journal | April 10, 2015
Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-they-be-accepted-as-a-singular-pronoun-1428686651?mod=trending_now_3

Copy editors might seem like stick-in-the-mud traditionalists when it comes to language change, but when I attended the American Copy Editors Society’s annual conference in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago, I found growing acceptance of a usage that has long been disparaged as downright ungrammatical: treating “they” as a singular pronoun.

According to standard grammar, “they” and its related forms can only agree with plural antecedents. But English sorely lacks a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, and “they” has for centuries been pressed into service for that purpose, much to the grammarians’ chagrin. Now, it seems, those who have held the line against singular “they” may be easing their stance.

“They” most often turns singular in common usage when its antecedent is considered generic, not referring to a single known person. Nearly everyone would find that they can stomach the “they” in this very sentence, agreeing with “nearly everyone.” Things get trickier when the antecedent of “they” more clearly refers to one person. A reader of this column may not like what they see in this sentence, for instance.
More Word on the Street

Still, there is no question that “they” is more idiomatic than clunky alternatives that include both genders, as in “he or she,” “he/she” or “(s)he.” All of those seek to replace “he” as a generic pronoun, which has been fading ever since the move toward nonsexist language in the 1970s.

At the ACES conference, the topic of singular “they” came up again and again—for example, at a session I took part in called “Ask a Lexicographer,” with representatives from Merriam-Webster, American Heritage and Oxford dictionaries. When pressed on whether “they” could serve as a singular pronoun, my fellow lexicographers and I pointed out that it already has done so for about seven centuries, appearing in the work of writers from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Jane Austen. Merriam-Webster associate editor Emily Brewster turned the question back to the audience. The only thing standing in the way of singular “they” becoming more acceptable? Copy editors who take it upon themselves to edit out the usage, she said.

Lately, transgender issues have been driving the call for a more inclusive pronoun. The singular “they” avoids having to assign a static role to someone transitioning from one gender to another. And many who identify as transgender or “gender fluid” would prefer the use of the pronoun “they” rather than “he” or “she.”

In Sweden, similar debates have led to increasing acceptance of the pronoun “hen,” which has been proposed since the 1960s as a gender-neutral alternative to “han” (“he”) and “hon” (“she”). The efforts of those pushing for “hen” will pay off next week, when it’s included among 13,000 new words in the Swedish Academy’s official dictionary.

Could English find its own equivalent to Swedish “hen”? Dozens of gender-neutral pronouns have been put forth over the years, including “thon,” “xe” and “ze,” but all have failed to catch fire. “They” has the virtue of actually being in common use, and even grammatical sticklers may be coming around to it.

(End of article)

[esl_prof]

The Princeton Review clearly would condemn such thinking.

http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=110368

[esl_prof]

[buravirgil]

The author had to dance a little to frame this issue...