Re: He, She *and* It [Was: Re: the absurdity of "language families"]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, Bob Cunningham wrote:
On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:23:49 +0100, Matthew Huntbach
<mmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, Bob Cunningham wrote:
(follow-up set to alt.usage.english)
On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:20:09 +0100, Matthew Huntbach
<mmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

In the case of "Is he or she a man or a woman?", "they"
doesn't work well because it's quite clear that only one
person is being discussed.

It works peferctly well for me. In casual English, in Britain at
least, "they" is often encountered in cases where it's quite clear that
only one person is being discussed. If you were to ask an English person
"What would you do if a friend came unexepctedly to your house?", I
suspect the answer would be something like "I would give them a cup of
tea, then ...".

To me, the sense of plurality is there. The friend could be
one of more than one friend.

This gives an explanation of how singular-they may have arisen, but I'm
suggesting it has slipped into such common usage that even the sense of
pluarlity is no longer required. Same happened in the past with
singular-you, of course.

A problem with coming up with a counterexample is that in
most cases where you have someone definite in mind, you know
whether that someone is male or female, so you don't need
singular "they". You have the gender-dependent pronouns.

I suppose you could say something like

At a party I met a person who may have been either
a female or a male cross-dresser. I didn't converse
with them long enough to find out which.

Despite the fact that I'm thoroughly convinced of the
utility, propriety, and prevalence of singular "they" in
general, that "them" jars for me.

It may jar for you, but for me singular-they is so common that it doesn't
jar at all in casual use, and you don't need to introduce the idea of a person of indeterminate gender for it to to work, it might equally well be:

At a party I met someone who may have been either a solicitor or
a barrister. I didn't converse with them long enough to find out.

That is, at least in casual speech in southern England, singular-they
is often used for a person whose gender is known but is not relevant
to the point being made. The point has been reached where *not* to
use singular-they sounds as if you are trying to make a point about
the gender of the person.

Googling on "I met them", I came across the following:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/vote2001/hi/english/features/newsid_1358000/1358219.stm

Look at the bottom, it asks "Have you met a key election figure in your town, workplace or home?", and then you have to fill in the boxes marked
"Who I met" and "Where I met them". While, ok, the sense of plurality
is there, it starts off clearly with the singular "a key election figure"
and then uses "them" as the pronoun for that figure. And this is from the
BBC.

Here another example:

http://www.charlieproductions.co.uk/appendix/howto/castafilm.asp

Look at that third paragraph "I give the actor a copy of the script" is
followed by repeated use of third-person-plural pronouns for someone
clearly identified in the singular.

I agree that in formal writing, I'm attuned enough to singular-they
to know to avoid it, but I feel that may be through having been formally
taught about it, rather than naturally finding it wrong.

Matthew Huntbach
.

Relevant Pages

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