They
Ever notice how we love to use this gender neutral pronoun? I finally realized we almost always use it to mean the opposite gender. If a woman says "I was talking to my friend and 'they' said...", 99% of the time, she's talking about a guy. Otherwise she would have said "...and 'she' said...". Isn't that interesting? So next time you hear someone do this, you can say "so what is his name?" (if a woman said it) and make her blush. :) Toodles!
AndyOfVermont is to blame for this 9:55 PM
Just two days ago this was ice. I guess this must be the UVM sailing team out practicing.
This still is ice
But these peeps have shorts on
2 cool people commented so far!
Actually, the opposite-gender thing is not what goes on with 'they' as a generic pronoun. In fact, 'they' has a long and distinguished history of being the gender-neutral pronoun in English; the dictum that 'he' is gender neutral is more recent and largely hasn't been adopted in everday speech. People tend to be confused about that because of too much exposure to the King James Version or other prescriptive programs, but 'he' is more recent and has less of a hold in the language. In fact, I think that we should skip the dictum--most of us don't use it, anyway--and just declare 'they' to be the gender-neutral, singular pronoun. But, one might object, it's not singular. But, I would say as a descriptive linguist, it is if people use it that way, and they do, as they have been for centuries. So then what we need to say about 'they' is that it is both, depending on context, the gender-neutral singular and the gender-neutral plural. Lots of languages make fewer distinctions than that at the pronoun level; some languages manage to skip pronouns completely or almost completely, thanks to verb morphology (such languages are called pro-drop languages, meaning that they'd rather get by without pronouns when possible). While I'm here, though, I should point out that 'they' has yet another use, as a pragmatic 'not us/not me'. To quote one of my favorite songs: "They say there's a place where the dreams have all gone ..." That 'they' isn't designating anyone in particular--it's neutral with regard to both number and gender; it's more similar to the 'it' of 'it's raining', which, in linguistic terms, is called a 'dummy subject'--it's doing no semantic work (i.e., not providing any meaning), but is filling in a required syntactic slot. We need to have a 'they' in 'they say' because English largely insists on keeping the subject slot filled, but the 'they' in 'they say' doesn't add any semantic content.
I 100% agree. And I actaully had a conversation with a co-worker to this effect.
If I could make two almost meaningless petitions to our culture, the use of "they" as the standard accepted non-specific gender pronoun would be one. The second would be to change our national anthem to "America the Beautiful"
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