Twenty-four Days of Blogging, Day 13: “They know that Santa’s on his way”

A friend of mine posted n interesting article on Facebook today. You can find it here. It talks about the fact the the Washington Post Style Guide now accepts the pronouns they, them, and their for a singular antecedent (e.g. After a person has totaled your car by driving it through a Christmas tree lot, you get angry at them). This represents a shift from the long maintained rule that the pronoun for an singular antecedent should be he or she if the gender is known and he or he or she if unknown (e.g. If someone should forget where he or she hid the elf on a shelf, he or she should retrace his or her footsteps).

There was the predictable ringing of Facebook hands over this movement one step closer to Armageddon. My first reaction was the same, that the barbarians at the gate had been given a skeleton key. However, after reading the entire article and thinking further, I had a surprising second reaction. After all, I’m the person who cringes every time I hear someone pronounce the T in often. But I’m OK with this; it’s probably a good thing.

My first reason for embracing this change was found in the article itself. The use of the singular they is not a modern corruption of perfect language. It has been found regularly in English for centuries, and it has been used by our greatest writers including Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible (which is the word of God…male and female he may have made them, but he can’t always keep the pronouns straight). In fact, many of the modern “traditional” rules are modern devices to try to codify a messy language. Writers have always used the singular they because it’s often hard to write beatutiful language without it.

Which leads to my second argument, the singular they can lead to cleaner construction and clearer meaning. For years it has been somewhat acceptable to use it in speech because it can be difficult on the fly to manage the verbal trapeze of him or her (When a shepherd left his or her flock to visit the babe, he or she brought his or her staff to frighten and wolves that he or she might encounter on the way). They can clean this and so many stilted sentences without any loss of clarity. When reading The altar server dropped the candle and burned their cassock, no one wonders who they are.

Finally, I long for a day when I can get rid of the choice between sexist language or bad writing. I was taught that the singular pronoun to represent either gender was he. Claims that this was sexist were always poo-pooed with the fact that he represented he or she, which was a much easier claim to make as a male having all of language assume masculinity as universal, than it would be for a female. However, the solution of compound hes and shes seemed a terrible price to pay for appropriate sensitivity. The sometimes suggested (but luckily never adopted) s/he is beyond execrable, and other efforts to create new gender neutral pronouns have been about as successful as Esperanto (one could argue that Esperanto is a more successful language adaptation. There are several books and at least one movie that use it). There is no need for a new gender neutral pronoun, for we all know the gender neutral pronoun is they.

Think what a pleasure it will be to not stop mid sentence to fit form over meaning. One of the greatest arguments for this adaptation is that most (including me) naturally use the singular they. It is only through habit that we stop and restructure our thoughts and our language (maybe I should just make it plural). The Washington Post is not changing language, they are setting us free from a meaningless tyranny.

…and isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

As always, I welcome your comments.

Image: http://www.zazzle.co.uk/they+pronoun+stickers

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