Stop the Grammar Controlling the Word “they”
If someone wants to address a person whose gender they do not know or who has no gender, they can use a certain very common pronoun in English. You know what I’m talking about. I just used it twice. Congratulations to them so that they became the word of the year-Webster the Merriam .
But we have to talk about something. There are some curmudgeons who argue that they cannot be singular (it is absolutely possible), or who refuse to admit the concept of a non-binary person into their brain. These people are wrong in every way.
I received angry emails about this pronoun, just like the people at Merriam Webster are currently tweeting from people who have decided to take up arms against the fact that they ever referenced a person. This humble pronoun is newfangled and somehow, they claim, “PC”. (This is neither one nor the other.)
It is true that many style and grammar guides encourage the use of these for groups of people only and awkward designs like he or she are for one person. However, it is also true that people use singulars they are damned all the time, which is fine.
A few weeks after a particularly smug old grumbler wrote to me to complain at length about my use of them in a Lifehacker post (“You are indeed a part of our dying society,” they thought), I chuckled to myself every time when I saw a word in a formal context or from a teacher or other authority figure. For example, in a note from preschool, I was asked to help my child with his craft. Anyone expecting to hear or read English without bumping into the singular they quickly find themselves frustrated.
Both applications are singular they are correct
First, the idea of using “they” to refer to one person, who can be of either gender, goes back hundreds of years. Shakespeare used it like this :
No person I meet, but greets me as if I were their well-known friend
Merriam-Webster explains that this is no coincidence: examples abound throughout the history of our language. “English is notoriously lacking a gender-neutral singular pronoun that exactly matches singular pronouns such as everyone or someone , and as a result, they have been used for this purpose for over 600 years,” says announcement of the year.
We all use singular they signify the face of unidentified identities. (I guarantee even my grumpy writer slips into this every now and then.) But what about their / their pronouns for one famous person?
Just use them.
I mean, what else can you say about human pronouns? For example, if someone is not binary and does not use him or her , it would be wrong to use these pronouns to refer to them. (There are , of course, other gender-neutral pronouns besides these , and you can read about them here .)
While you may need to rephrase a sentence from time to time to make it clear that you are talking about one person, this is unlikely to become a burden. It would be much more embarrassing and perhaps rude to rephrase every sentence by saying that this person, my friend, or our distinguished guest avoids using the pronoun. Instead, I invite anyone who finds it unusual that they are uncomfortable practicing this more often so that they can overcome themselves.
Update 12/11/2019: Earlier we said, “If someone is not binary, it would actually be wrong to use him or her to refer to them.” But a person who considers himself non-binary may also sometimes use these pronouns.