I have often been asked by people over 35 or so, “Are we supposed to say ‘they want’ or ‘they wants’?” I always answer that the proper form is “they want,” but must it be?...
Under the current dispensation, “they want to trim the cat’s claws” can refer to an individual or more than one person. Context usually makes the meaning known, but surely it would make things a little clearer if we could use “they wants to trim the cat’s claws” when referring to just one person....
One reason I think “they wants” could catch on is that English speakers made an attempt to “fix” the way pronouns were used with verbs not so terribly long ago.... [W]ell into the 19th century, even educated people often said “you was” rather than “you were.”...
“Where, sir, was you on the night of the 22nd of December, 1799?” asked a lawyer in a trial in New York City in 1800. Today we associate “you was” with colloquial speech and especially Black English. But this was a very white man in the legal profession. John and Abigail Adams also often used “you was” in their famous letters to each other....
One might add that aversion to saying "they wants" could be characterized as seeming racist: Are you afraid you might sound like a black person? But McWhorter doesn't use that idea to support his argument.
If we have to make the effort to call an individual person "they," then why not proceed to make the verb singular? Making the effort is signaling your virtue, and here's an opportunity to signal even louder. Is it even more effort? The speaker must pay attention and do a bit more, but the listener is relieved of the challenge to understand whether one or more persons are being referred to. There's more clarity.
It's not aesthetically pleasing, of course, at least not at first. I'm not endorsing McWhorter's recommendation. Just examining it.
ADDED: If I needed to follow McWhorter's new rule, I would think of "they" as a nickname for the person, rather than a pronoun. I'll start a new post on this topic.
AND: Here's the new post.
Posts
69 comments:
I have no need to appease the crazies who (whom?) want to use “they” as a singular pronoun.
99% of the public will never speak that way.
Whitman said "I contain multitudes" -- a singular noun and a singular verb. That ought to resolve the issue, in OUR opinion.
wouldn't the Simple and Sensible Solution be to just hospitalize EVERYONE who misuses pronouns?
Once word got out, that "theying" meant frontal lobotomies.. Not MANY people would keep it up.
There are a LOT a crazy people in the country today, we are encouraging them..
If we would discourage them (with brain surgery instead of breast surgery), the problems would fix themselves
This is like the crew of the Titanic arguing over the placement of deck chairs.
They in plurality, schizophrenia, and royalty. We approve.
That said, racism is a subset of diversity (i.e. color judgment, class bigotry), a progressive, systemic taxonomy of the human race, and a well-established sociopoliticosexual fetish in liberal cultures.
Me want cookie
- Cookie Monster
If we have to make the effort to call an individual person "they," then why not proceed to make the verb singular? Making the effort is signaling your virtue, and here's an opportunity to signal even louder. Is it even more effort?
Instead, how about English come up with a singular neuter pronoun. Maybe, I know this is bold, but maybe we could call it "It".
Not a He? Not a She? It it is.
I wish I could find the article, but it had to do with some Oregon group opening up the great outdoors to LGBTQLSMFTSTP∞. Said group had some theys in it. Entire paragraphs were rendered incomprehensible because of referring both to the entire group and Theys within the group.
Foxtrot Tango.
The proper response when some one demands that you use "they" is to ask "Is there a mouse in your pocket?" When he/she says no, then say "'They' is 3rd person plural. Without you having a mouse in your pocket, I cannot use 'They.'"
There are rare people who are neither XX nor XY, and can be properly referred to as non-binary.
Similarly, there are rare people who are two-for-one- properly known as conjoined or "Siamese" twins. These are appropriately to as "they."
Everyone else is either normal or nuts.
NYT can piss up its own leg, thank you.
I use he or she, depending on sex.
It depends on what the meaning of ‘you is’ is.
Where's that Bob Newhart bit where he says "Just stop it!" ?
wouldn't the Simple and Sensible Solution be to just hospitalize EVERYONE who misuses pronouns?
Once word got out, that "theying" meant frontal lobotomies.. Not MANY people would keep it up.
They should have done that to the people who insisted on using the plural "you" instead of the singular thou/thee as was right and meant to be.
Being the bomb-throwing radical that I am, I have an idea so nutty it just might work. Let's refer to penis'ed-Americans as "he," vagina'ed-Americans as "she," and groups of more than one such American as "they." We could even generalize this to include non-Americans if absolutely necessary. Now, before you dismiss this idea as literally something that only a fascist, warmongering, deplorable, genocidal, white supremacist, MAGA insurectionist could support, let me remind you that it has the advantage of being reality based AND, due to long usage, completely clear without the need to tinker with English grammer.
“If we have to make the effort to call an individual person "they," then why not proceed to make the verb singular? Making the effort is signaling your virtue, and here's an opportunity to signal even louder.”
I’d rather signal my literacy by using language correctly. People who use “they” as a singular pronoun are not speaking English, but some other language that I don’t understand and have no interest in learning.
I was under the impression that linguistic change was a bottom-up process. People start to use words, phrases, and syntactical methods that feel right, and eventually linguists bless the results. McWhorter seems to be advocating for a new "correct" form of speech. This is strangely at odds with his relativistic approach to correct grammar and diction in his writings on novel speech patterns among minority groups.
My proposal is that we agree that male, man and boy refers to a person born with a penis, and that female, woman and girl refers to a person born with a vagina. For the exceedingly rare people born with neither or both, they can choose. My proposal has the advantage of being consistent across cultures for thousands of years.
This suggestion seems to be out of character for someone who wrote the book Woke Racism. He was not willing to accept the tenets of anti-racism for blacks; however, in this case he seems to be willing to change English grammar to cater to the lunacy of LBGTQ+ ideology. I would think that as a linguist he would be offended by the misuse of subject-verb agreement. His suggestion to use the expression “they wants” to make the meaning clear seems to mean that he is willing to give into the mob.
The proper response when some one demands that you use "they" is to ask "Is there a mouse in your pocket?"
The proper response when some one demands that you use "they" is to say "You are free to engage in whatever silliness makes you happy but I will decline to join you in such."
Language is by convention, and changes. Correctness in the sense people keep wanting it to mean is largely an illusion. The proof of this takes about a paragraph, but people want so badly for their version to be correct and enforce it for others that it is ignored. I am uncomfortable with "they" in the modern contexts, but I am 70 and that is expected. Top down changes sometimes work, sometimes don't. Consider "Ms." for example. That became part of the language even though people objected strenuously to it in the 70s.
You can usually tell what is going to happen in 20 years by looking at what the young women are doing now. Middle-aged women and young men usually follow. What old guys like me think is irrelevant in language, no matter how much patriarchal power we supposedly hold. This isn't theory. It is what happens in every language everywhere, century after century. Old guys try to set rules, Those sometimes sorta work but mostly, they are only obeyed in the short run.
I didn't ask you if you liked that or approve of it.
*If you went to Papua NG to learn some language and interviewed the speakers in the village and figured out what they used, you would have the language. If someone told you that there were two old guys up in the hills who insisted that a particular form among the young people was wrong because "it comes from another village" (or only the knuckleheads in theirs), you would just ignore that. If someone said "Yeah, but the chief really likes that form and insists everyone in his circle uses it" you would yawn.
English is not different.
This generation is really going to be embarrassed when they look back on their "accomplishments".
I’ve been reading Steven Pinker’s “The Sense of Style”, and he has that super-annoying virtue-signaling feminist-appeasing tic of intermittently writing “she” and “her” as singular generic pronouns. It will be interesting to see what stylistic knots he ties himself into trying to work the singular “they” into his next book.
If you want to sound like an uneducated dumbass, it is no skin off my back.
They was fixin' to decolonize the parlance but them was disputaceous. What if they was not the only one of them, and them was not the only one of they, who could conceivably casts the deciding vote.
But them's on first.
They is hay to quiet the braying asses.
Rampant pronoun madness is a byproduct of the insane and barbaric woke culture that has such an adamantine grasp on Old Joe's short and curlies. Resistance is called for. Edit yourself. Purge the filthy they habit. There is fine language aplenty that goes unused by intelligent people who simply by the "don't offend" imperative have fallen into the unthinking habits of speech and writing that spawns those insidious plurals. In a nutshell: Don't use the enemy's language. It's their chief weapon against civilization.*
* Along with fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and a fanatic devotion to the pope.
I have yet to deal with it, but if I do, party cake salad three squares.
I never realized before that Sméagol was an early gender-bender. "They wants the Precious ! They wants it !!
Maybe "they" should just fuck right off.
"Are you afraid you might sound like a black person?"
Are you afraid you might sound like a white redneck using a country colloquialism?
"They wants" sounds better if you add a "precioussss" or two after it.
Why does it never seem to Dawn on these people that if you have to go around the room and ask everyone's pronoun, you might as well ask for their name.
The royal “they.”
We have pronouns for brevity and to avoid repetitive sounds.
Just repeat the person’s name each time.
They need to pull their finger out of their ass and grow up.
You is plural and singular and very few people (none that I have ever noticed) use the plural form. Instead most people substitute something like "you all" or "you guys". It is therefore not a stretch to use they as singular/plural.
But it will not end there and in fact it has not.
My court appointed lawyer was a man in a dress. The only person in the front of the courtroom who was not a lawyer working for the government was me. Can you imagine how it would have gone had I referred to the man in the dress as a "she"?
It was a nice uniform though, and just not red.* Or should we call it, as Althouse refers to football uniforms, a costume?
*Back to you Quaestor.
Foxtrot tango: Thank you for the LSMFT. C’an’t remember
if it made the leap to TV advertising or if I last heard it on the radio.
I’m almost certain the timeframe was the 1950s.
Reading Althouse's post, I suddenly realized Gollum was trans. Tolkien, a man ahead of his time.
I prefer to utilize the royal in hoc signo vinces "they", in polite society, wherever particular people congregate.
Edit: how it would have gone had I referred to my appointed lawyer as a "he".
Badly is the answer I suspected at the time, so I did not refer to him at all. I just took my medicine and kept quiet.
A few days back I was watching the Timcast YouTube channel. Poole's subject was his conversation with a Dutch citizen about the electoral victory of Gert Willder's Partij voor de Vrijheid. From the context, it was abundantly clear that his interlocutor was a single person, but without pausing for a breath, Poole obscured his reportage with plural pronouns and verbs as if he feared to use a gendered singular. This is just one example of a pernicious and increasingly pervasive habit that threatens our ability to communicate with our fellow humans.
A civilization cannot rest on a foundation of anthropoid grunts and snorts, but that's where our language is headed if this foolishness persists. If a eunuch in a cocktail dress declares his pronouns to you, inform him (or it) that he's free to use whatever words he chooses, but his choices do not restain anyone else. If I call you he when you long to be called she, go ahead, cry me a river.
I suggest the Modern Language Association create a new language to save everyone from gender oppression. Let it be called "Twinklish". For sure every sentence should end on a rising tone, so no one sounds assertive. Kind of like Canadian upspeak. It should be fully declined to include a case for everyone's preferred gender. That should keep scholars busy for millenia.
Althouse said "Are you afraid you might sound like a black person?" But it's fun to sound like a black person! Back at Washington University, my roommate and I used to quote long passages of Huckleberry Finn to each other, using full Missouri Negro dialect. There was white kid from East St. Louis whose normal speech was that of the Missouri Negro. It was delightful.
Walt Whitman, contradicting himslf, was large and contained multitudes. Surely, after his grammatical largesse unto his own self, we can accept that those who today are they rather than him, her, or just one of them, can also contradict themselves in the opposite direction and contain a singlular they. I bet they all can do so if y'all can.
They should have done that to the people who insisted on using the plural "you" instead of the singular thou/thee as was right and meant to be.
Actually "you" was also singular when people used "thee." "You" is the more formal singular, or plural (like "usted" in Spanish), "thee" was for someone you knew well or of lower class.
"There's more clarity."
Actually, only a little less lack of claririty.
Sticking to basic grammar provides clarity and common understanding. Of course, the point of the prog assault is to undermine such understanding and to show that even basic rules can be overturned at their whim.
But I am not opposed to new pronouns that fit the rules, e.g., "zhe" or "xe" as third-person singular for non-binaries.
It.
All respect to McWhorter, but is he nuts? No white person will say "they wants".
In the digital world where you literally can't see someone's sex, people will use they. It's the preliminary pronoun.
My first thought was not black people, but Gollum from Lord of the Ring. They wants the gender-neutral pronoun, those tricksy Hobbitses.
But I'm just anti-Racist like that.
The old rule that "they" is always plural works for me but I am reminded that "y'all" came to be when Southerners wanted to make "you all" the plural of "you" General speaking, "you" is the second-person singular pronoun, while the contraction "y'all" is modern English's answer to a second-person plural pronoun. North of the Mason-Dixon Line, "youse" - short for "you guys" - becomes the plural pronoun. But I was born and spent my youth just 18 miles north of that line where the line connects to the Ohio River which defines the North-South split thereafter and I have never said "youse" aloud.
Most readers spent some time learning the irregularities of whatever foreign language they were required to learn to graduate from some institution of higher and not-so-higher education. We have an obligation to maintain all the American-English irregularities for the betterment and job-security of American-English teachers everywhere.
"...wants..."
English has dropped personal endings from all of its verbs - except for the 3rd person singular in the present tense. Another option is to complete the process and drop the "s".
Been around black people most of my life and many have a disdain for subject verb agreement. It’s they thing.
James K said...
"You" is the more formal singular, or plural (like "usted" in Spanish), "thee" was for someone you knew well or of lower class.
At Sir Walter Ralegh's trial for treason, the prosecutor said "I thou thee, thou traitor! I will prove thee the rankest traitor in all England." signaling that he saw Sir Walter as no longer worthy of respect.
There is nothing new about "they" as a non-gender-specific singular pronoun. The opposite, in fact. Limiting it to the plural is a recent aberration. What is new is using it when you know the gender of the person. That's where the problem creeps in. If you know the person's gender and yet you use "they," you are suggesting they are not alone.
We live in a society where, instead of helping the mentally ill get treatment so they can live healthy well-adjusted lives, we lie to them and each other. We harm them in real long-term ways rather than risk hurting their feelings in the moment. It's cowardly.
Reading Shakespeare can be a study in how the thou/you pair were used and occasionally misused at the time.
As an example, in Richard III, Richard has a conversation with Queen Margaret, who was the widow of the previous king, Henry VI. Richard needed an alliance with Margaret to bolster his power.
At the start of the converaation, Richard addresses her with "thou". She subtlely reminds him that, as the wife of the previous monarch and that they had not established a friendship, he was required to address her with "you". Richard sweet talks her so much that by the end of the scene he addresses her with "thou" and she does not object.
"... it would make things a little clearer if we could use ..." pronouns that reflect singular or plural as they actually exist.
There is no attempt to make things clearer here. It is an attempt to twist language and re-educate the vast majority so that the stupid "they" pronoun for an individual doesn't look quite as stupid.
When I speak to someone, I'm generally not contemplating their genitalia or sexual delusions. If they are and insist I participate, they're either predatory or delusional.
I'm glad I don't run a nonprofit anymore. Lots of crazies in that world. Taking the minutes must be a nightmare.
This is a "no brainer" . . . .
In our house with our cats only a fool would try to trim any cat's claws by themselves which is to they "they want to trim the cats' claws." :D
People who use "they" when "he" or "she" would be accurate are not saying "they" because they do not know the sex of the subject. They use "they" because they do not think it's appropriate to differentiate between men and women. It's a political statement, one that distinguishes the speaker/writer from the unwashed.
I continue to use "he or she" in situations where I intend a single subject of unknown sex- it's more cumbersome to write or say, but conveys a more specific and accurate meaning. I mean one person. There is no confusion on anyone's part about the correct form of verb to use either.
"If a person does not want to go to the polling place, they can vote by mail," tells the reader a lot more than the available mechanisms of voting.
I’ve been reading Steven Pinker’s “The Sense of Style”, and he has that super-annoying virtue-signaling feminist-appeasing tic of intermittently writing “she” and “her” as singular generic pronouns.
I typically employ the Late Heinlein convention: for generic singular pronouns, use the ones that would apply to you. So I use she/her.
As for this "singular they" thing: I listened to a whole podcast in which McWhorter held forth on this topic with his linguistics hat on. I get it; language evolves. But I agree with, I think it was tim macguire, above: this change is not arising organically. It's being imposed, top down, to make a particular point with which many - maybe even a majority - do not agree.
There have long been people who have used "they" in order not to sound sexist (may I again recommend the Late Heinlein convention?). That really was an organically arising change. But that instance of "they" replaced "he" in generic usage. What's being imposed on us now is the use of "they" in specific usage, when it's clear that a single, known person is being referred to.
Even just when I was a high school student, IIRC, the Spanish "usted" was always capitalized (at least in my textbooks!). That convention seems to be entirely gone. So I'm not going to say that we as an English-speaking society will not ultimately accept a specific singular "they," nor that, if we do, it will take many generations. But I do think we should acknowledge that we're not just talking about the ordinary evolution of language in this case.
Tangentially related, but another turn of phrase I've noticed popping up over the last several years that causes me to roll my eyes, is when people refer to a singular person as a 'diverse person.'
There is a line between putting (new) words or phrases into common parlance, but most just demonstrate ignorance and illiteracy.
Should the English language be simplified? Possibly, but look what happens when you bastardize (sic) word such as color/colour...
Adding 's' to the end of words does not make it better or easier to understand. There are words that are both plural and singular: automation, math, fish (although that's an odd one, with fishes thrown into the mix).
Doesn't solve the issue at all because this proposal only applies when "they" is the subject of the sentence. Here's an example I make: There's a group of people meeting for the day, and lunch is included. Someone is instructed that it's time to "give them a sandwich." One person in the group, Flynn, uses the pronoun "they." Who is the intended recipient(s) of sandwiches? What if Flynn is allergic to eggs and isn't supposed to get any sandwiches made with mayonnaise, but because of this identity confusion, they gets passed a sandwich w/mayo. Flynn assumes that they is getting a safe sandwich, eats it, and dies right there in front of the horrified group.
Why would we want to kill people who have allergies?
Why is there so much consternation about pronouns when a pronoun is only used when that person is not around? Screw those persons who are so concerned with that. I guess micro, i.e. 1E-6, is a truly fitting prefix to "aggression"... Although, maybe a quectoaggression would be better.
When I mean to refer to someone who wants to be referred to as they/them, I just say "the asshole." Everybody seems to understand immediately who I'm talking about.
He him, she her, XX XY. Everything else is fictional.
I’ve been reading Steven Pinker’s “The Sense of Style”, and he has that super-annoying virtue-signaling feminist-appeasing tic of intermittently writing “she” and “her” as singular generic pronouns.
There is another reason it is super annoying: in almost all cases, it is completely illogical. If one is writing about a specific person, then that person's details are knowable.
However, in the Pinker case, he is talking about some class of people which, which should be treated as plural. Here is an example from W TX Intermediate Crude:
"If a person does not want to go to the polling place, they can vote by mail," tells the reader a lot more than the available mechanisms of voting.
Pinker would have written that sentence using "she", unless the last time he did so, he would use "he".
Since a class of people is inherently plural, the use of "person" gets in the way. Instead:
"Those who do not want to go to the polling place may vote by mail." gets rid of the subject - object disagreement, and is less wordy.
Theys be wantin' to trim the cat's claws.
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