Singular "they"

Yeah, it's been over a month (I wrote, as I started this post, which I am getting back to after another month). I totally forgot what I was supposed to write about. Well, now I remember. And looking back, pondering the things I thought about writing when I first thought of writing this post, really, it's been longer than a month. Much, much longer.

I am not the person who should be writing this post. I say this not out of misgivings or in anticipation of any regrets. It's just a job I'd think others would be better qualified for. It's something that someone, somewhere else, should have already written. And I haven't seen it. So it falls to me. I have an amateur interest in language. Grammar is a hobby I might dabble in, but I am not an expert. And it's worth it to have an expert write this. Instead, you get me. And for that, I apologize in advance.

Much has been written regarding the singular usage of the "they" pronoun (along with its other common forms, "them" and "their"). Generally, these screeds fall into two categories.

1. Proclamations that prescriptions against the singular usage of this set of pronouns is silly, senseless, stupid, and utterly without merit. It is declared that the trend in general usage favors this and that the antediluvian snobs who protest such usage are fighting a losing battle. Eventually they'll all die and the rest of us can move on.
2. Dissertations on the longstanding historical usage of this set of pronouns. Did you know that it goes all the way back to Chaucer? Shakespeare did it too! My Grandma did it. It's already a part of the language, really. Prescriptions against it are the shrill commandments ivory tower academic patriarchs or something. They just want to police everyone else's language. For reasons.

Both versions have sufficiently saturated the internet to the point that I'd have thought some annoyed grammar hero would have set the record straight. And if one has, it's really too bad that I've missed it. Fortunately, both versions are pretty easy to rebut. I will do so now.

1. I'm not dead yet. Also, don't be an idiot. Debates over language usage aren't settled by vague declarations about extrapolation of future trends. Yes, language does evolve. But the fact that you're bothering to call your opponents names and dubiously declaring victory on the spot is an indication that this is not, in fact, settled. You don't see people publishing articles declaring "thy" to be a dead pronoun.
2. Every essay, journal article, blog post, etc. that argues for the long-established accepted usage of singular "they" quotes the same passages from the same authors. It's like five references that get quoted by all of these people. OK, there are more, but all of them, even the Chaucer one that's so popular, display notional agreement. It is disingenuous to cite a bunch of quotes displaying notional agreement and then use that as support for your claim that a pronoun should be used without notional agreement.

You wouldn't know it from reading the crap I post in blog stuff, but I can be a grammar nerd when I want to be, and for a while I took formal writing pretty seriously. From a very young age, this sort of thing was something I was actually good at. I'm derailing this post to talk about myself, and I probably shouldn't. Oh well. As a kid in school, there were some skills I struggled with, so I took pride in the things I was good at. Usually I was the best in my class at spelling and grammar. My reading comprehension scores were off the charts. In first grade, I was tested as having a ninth-grade reading level. When I was in high school, we all took the STAR Reading test. I had the highest score out of my whole senior class. So yeah, I was that guy, I guess. I was also confident in my skills. Overconfident, actually. And when it came to this one academic subject, yeah, maybe I was a pretty bright kid. But some of the teachers had studied the subject in college, and had been teaching it for longer than I'd been alive. So there were occasions on which I boldly assumed I had everything figured out, that I was the untouchable Grammar Ace, and then I'd be informed that I was wrong. Making a little mistake didn't bother me. Never has, never does. We're human. We make mistakes. It took more than that. One of these occasions was in eighth grade, concerning the usage of the pronoun "their."

For now, let's just assume we're operating under a prescription that has "they" and its other forms as a plural pronoun. Consider the antecedent "everyone." Does it take on a plural pronoun or a singular one? In my eighth grade class, on my reading, I went with plural. I used "their." Can't remember what the whole sentence was, but it doesn't really matter. My teacher corrected me, and I was taken aback. It turns out that "everyone" is a nuanced word. I was interpreting it as synonymous with "all." But he insisted that it meant "each." The reality is, it depends on context. The word can be synonymous with either of those. If it was read as meaning "all" then "their" would have been appropriate. But if it was "each" and not "all" then it should have gotten "his or her."

I accept that one could outsnob me and insist that the "one" in "everyone" necessitates an "each" reading. My teacher did just that. But I find that this misses the point. Sometimes "everyone" really is "all." And that's where notional agreement comes in. There's probably going to be a tone-shift now because I wrote everything above this line about a month ago. I ran out of time and figured I'd get back to it soon. Well, it's later now. Or something. Look, this is just how I operate. Deal with it. I've made all of this seem highly technical, but really, it's blisteringly obvious. The proponents of singular "they" who cite Shakespeare or Chaucer or other old-timey writers as evidence of how such usage has always been part of the language must be aware of how obvious it is that the sentences they cite are not singular cases and not plural cases, but generalized cases. It happens all the time, and in fact I just did it in the previous sentence without thinking about it.

As with most linguistic rules, there are grey areas. Like dangling participles or terminal prepositions, some instances of a seemingly singular "they" would easily be parsed by any speaker or reader of English, cause for commentary only among the neurotic or the pedantic. Other instances stick out like a sore thumb. And still others are in between. That doesn't mean we throw prescriptivism out entirely! I explained the importance of prescriptivism in my previous post. I can't help but think that the educated parties advocating for all-out adoption of "they" as a singular pronoun are being disingenuous on this. They'd be aware of the confusion stemming from this usage and the irregularities involved. Even now, despite a severe push to normalize singular "they", we can't get a consensus on whether it's "themself" or "themselves." And that's because English is a natural language. It evolved. It isn't built logically and attempts to brazenly alter the structure of the language to suit some faddish sensibilities comes with consequences. For decades, the battle over singular "they" was really about just that. And really, it still is. But the other side pulled a dirty trick in recent years.

They shifted the focus of the debate to be about compassion. They took an issue of grammar and changed the subject, changed it so that the debate was about gender and gender identity. But it was never really about that. I could say more, but perhaps I've said too much already. We'll see how this unfolds.