I often encounter documentation where the user is always referred to as just "she", even though most users are presumably male. In my experience it's a lot more common than the user being referred to as just "he", but that may be observation bias on my part.
I'm not a fan of "default she" or the even more awkward he/she - it just strikes me as weird pandering or over correcting.
So often the gender is completely irrelevant to the discussion, so just don't mention it. Use "they" or even avoid the pronoun completely and use "the user" or whatever.
> or even avoid the pronoun completely and use "the user" or whatever.
The problem is in practice it doesn't work and you would end up with monstrosities like "the user should define the user's own preferences in the user's preferences file located in the user's home directory."
No, because we're pragmatic people who (generally) know to not write shit like that? No matter what pronouns (or lack of) you use in that sentence, it's still bad.
I never said "avoid pronouns at all costs", but rather that there are alternatives you can use if it makes sense.
> I often encounter documentation where the user is always referred to as just "she"
As far as I know, no man has ever complained about this. Whenever I read "she" I don't feel excluded as the documentation is just giving an example. Why are the pronoun-warriors so focused on these issues?
Totally. I much prefer that we bring everyone in line with English, we should start doing PRs with other languages next. They must really be suffering without "they/them" pronouns :3
It's not more confusing than addressing your male or female cousin. Language isn't always helping, but using "they" for everybody just seems like a natural fit.
In isolation, yes, but when you're actually using this sentence there will be context. "When you want to onboard a new developer, they will require access."
"There's a new person joining the team."
"What do we need?"
"They require access to the stack."
Ah got it! So the solution is pretty much to prefix a short sentence to provide context that indicates that they is going to be used in a non-standard way, so instead of:
"They are at the door right now, please open it asap"
You'd say:
"Someone is visiting, they are at the door right now, please open it asap"
This indeed does not sound unnatural or misleading to me anymore.
(I know you'd probably just rephrase the second sentence but this is just and example)
"They are at the door right now, please open it asap" requires no count. It is fundamentally unambiguous in its phrasing, it could be 1 person or 50.
"They are at the door right now, please open it asap [and let a singular individual in]". If that bracketed portion is the intent, requires context. It implies a specific individual who you could identify by name or by a gendered pronoun if known (and unique in context) or description. Either way, you need to let the person you're speaking to know which "they" of the potentially many individuals at the door you want to permit in.
This context may have already been supplied. For instance, on visiting an office for an interview a name will already be supplied and the person (security, admin) doing the opening may already know the identity and that it is a singular person who is expected. In which case, "they", because of prior context, is entirely unambiguous again.
I find the whole “semantically singular, grammatically plural they” thing fascinating because it brings into European languages (granted, English is a pretty unusual one) an idea that I previously only encountered during a brief foray into Japanese:
Most of the time, either the number of the noun is clear from context or you are completely fine not knowing what it is.
“They are waiting at the door for you.” Is there one of them? Is there more? Who cares, the sentence covers both!
Granted, Japanese has syntactic gadgets that enable you to add that information in a natural way in cases where you actually do care, but it’s still surprising at first how much communication works without obsessively marking every noun for number. How do Japanese, Chinese, and Korean speakers communicate without grammatical number? The same way Russian speakers communicate without grammatical definiteness, or English speakers communicate without grammatical perfectiveness, or all of them communicate without grammatical clusivity, etc.: either they mark it explicitly or—in most cases—they can perfectly well do without. It’s technically ambiguous, but only in the way every other word that isn’t marked for every grammatical category found across human languages (i.e. every single word) is ambiguous.
(In case you were wondering why speakers of Slavic languages sometimes tend to overuse “some” and “this” in English, that’s why: those are the way their native languages, lacking obligatory articles, mark nouns for definiteness when it actually matters; the overuse is what happens when you teach articles as “these weird formal words you have to use according to these weird formal rules” without telling your students that they actually bear meaning.)
It's probably just my non-native context/semi-translation messing with my understanding, if someone told me "they are at the door" I'd be like "They!?"
For someone attempting to make an argument based on logic, you sure are missing a lot.
You attempt to create a ridiculous example just so that you can compare a flawed old example against an even more flawed new example, and say "this new way is worse, this is bad math". Logic duh amitrite?
Meanwhile you ignore the math of comparing the difference between being considerate to you vs being considerate to 50% of all humans.
It must suck being so threatened and being the only one who sees how insane everyone else is.
Context. Or “the <descriptor>“, like “the user requires access”.
“The user can change settings by selecting properties. Once there, they can opt out of silly debates.”
Is there any ambiguity? Pronouns belong in places where an identity can be, well, identified. Not standalone. Sans context we don’t even know who “he” is. If it’s a real person and not a hypothetical person, use their gendered pronoun if desired.
“Jtsummers needs access. His credentials can be verified by…”
It looks grammatically incorrect but the ambiguity is removed thanks to the "s" particle.
English already has similar irregularities in other contexts which seem to bother nobody.
i.e the sentence "If I were you, I'd do X and Y". The word "were" looks weird there but it solves a problem. Can't we treat "they" as singular in a similar manner?
Singular they is like plural you in English. Without context it’s hard to determine the intended count because the verb is conjugated the same way regardless of count. Unlike, say, Spanish or most Romance languages.
This can introduce ambiguity, but declining to use ancient (800 years, why are we debating it still?) inclusive phrasing because some people fail to create context for their pronouns is silly.
When I was learning French I quickly learnt not to question why something is right or wrong. It's wrong because the natives say it's wrong. It's as simple as that.
Regardless of count of native and non-native speakers, singular they is still 800+ years old in English. It is ambiguous without context around the potential count and it's unlikely the conjugation rules will change in the next few years to accommodate this. However, in English (and I suspect most languages) it's generally not common (or it is discouraged) to drop in a pronoun without sufficient context to identify the individual or group that it describes, which also includes count. So even if the verb conjugation remains ambiguous (with a phrase or sentence taken out of context), in context it should make sense so long as the person is semi-competent in communicating.
"They need access" - no context, ambiguous.
"They need access" while pointing towards an individual, unambiguous; while pointing toward a group of new students on the first day of school, unambiguous.
"They need access" in an email as a single line or a subject with no message body, completely ambiguous and will elicit a response of "Who needs access?" If it's part of a prior conversation chain that the recipient can recall, they'll give access to however many individuals they are aware of be it one or one hundred because it's unambiguous in the context (for them, but not for us).
Perhaps worth mentioning that "you" is "ambiguous" in exactly the same way: it's grammatically and historically plural but can now refer to either a single person or a group.
French and German also use a grammatically/historically plural form for polite "you". But Italian seems to use a feminine third-person pronoun for that purpose ...
I knew it could be applied to a group in certain cases, but only when referring the group as a single unit, really still singular. Or when speaking one-to-many, where each recipient is meant to hear you to refer to themselves, though the speaker spoke to a group.
"you 12 come with me" is really still referring to a single unit to me, the group, not the individuals. IE, it conveys no more meaning than saying "you come with me" where the object might be either a person or a group equally.
It's interesting, I don't think English has a way to distinguish "me singular" vs "me a member of a plural", other than by adding other words like "you all"
That is a pretty interesting idea. I love the idea that someone starting out with the desire to project their will on the rest of the world, becomes so successfull that they no longer own their own language. "If you didn't want other people to mess up your language, maybe you shouldn't have insisted that everyone else speak it?"
I'm a native speaker too and while I think there are a few areas where it feels a little unnatural, for the most part it seems natural to my ears. Could be a dialect based thing for how it feels though.
Native speaker here. It definitely does sound natural when used in the singular. When a person uses it in the singular, they're generally aware of what it means :)
Replying to my own comment to address the backlash as I can't possibly reply to every one (my account has been throttled for well over a year at this point).
For a start I find it telling that my comment was downvoted to -4 instantly. How can you downvote someone for stating what they do or don't find natural in their own language? Do you think I'm lying? Maybe I should start making comments about what I find natural in French instead?
You've all given examples of contexts where you don't find it unnatural. I agree with s some of them, so let me correct my original comment: it doesn't always sound natural.
> "I interviewed a developer yesterday." "Were they any good?"
This sounds OK if the gender has not yet been mentioned, but as soon as it has been mentioned it would be unnatural to use "they".
> Do they have grey hair? Yes, they do.
Also OK, until the gender has been established, as above.
> "Fin updated their profile picture"
This sounds completely unnatural to me and yes, I have noticed it. This is the same usage as in the PR in question here.
I also find it unnatural when "they" is used as the subject of a sentence in singular, like "When they travelled to London, they drank tea". If that's a single person, it sounds really jarring.
I think it's probably to do with the verb conjugation rather than the pronoun. As a French speaker you probably understand that the verb is equally, if not more, important than the pronoun. In Spanish they don't even bother with pronouns, it's all about about the verb. Unfortunately "they is" sounds totally wrong to every native speaker, so you're stuck with "they are", which is used for plural.
> For a start I find it telling that my comment was downvoted to -4 instantly. How can you downvote someone for stating what they do or don't find natural in their own language? Do you think I'm lying? Maybe I should start making comments about what I find natural in French instead?
I don't think you're lying. I think you're unfamiliar with your native language. As a fellow native English speaker, singular they sounds perfectly natural to me and has appeared in a great deal of prose that I've read, and not just 21st century text.
Do you think the people who downvoted you are all non-native English speakers passing judgement on you?
Linguist here. There’s no right way to understand your own language. The language is what native speakers collectively think that the language is. If they (by the way, am I referring to op now or to the native speakers?) think that something sounds unnatural, then it is unnatural to them. You can’t be wrong about this, just as you can’t be wrong about whether it feels natural to hug someone you met five minutes ago.
Everything we as linguists can do is to say that x feels natural to this many people and unnatural to this many people. However, when writing something, if enough people think that something feels unnatural, maybe you should investigate if you can phrase things differently so that more people will accept it.
With regard to your question, it works either way so there's no particular ambiguity. But since pronouns usually go to the most recent appropriate person/group, and you had not yet referred to the OP explicitly, the "they" could refer to a subset of native speakers who find it unnatural which also happens to include the OP, or just to the OP given the broader context of the message. And either way your comment comes out meaning the same thing:
People feel what they feel and can't be wrong about what they feel (because it's feeling, not a rational thing).
I don't disagree with that in any way whatsoever. But it doesn't mean that the OP is fundamentally correct either. I find the phrase "he/she" to be awkward, ignoring whether it's inclusive or not (which it isn't). "He" is fundamentally gendered despite what many people want to believe and is even less inclusive (even if we assume only the male and female genders, it necessarily excludes half the population). Consequently, singular "they" ends up being the most natural way to express a non-gendered arbitrary person, especially given that English has an 800+ year tradition of using it in that sense.
Also linguist here. You're right that there's no right way to understand your language, but it's also the case that you need to take a speaker's self-report with a grain of salt.
That speaker has probably seen singular they countless times without raising an eyebrow, and probably used it themselves. They may report being uncomfortable with it when their attention is called to it, but that doesn't always reflect their actual usage.
You get a better understanding by analyzing a corpus than by asking people. And the corpus makes clear that a lot of people have been comfortable with singular they, for a long time. I've even seen examples of people decrying singular they in sentences using singular they.
The self-reports are also data that's informative to the linguist. But they need context to gain perspective, because they're not always identical to what the speaker generates or accepts.
Singular "they" is such an improvement over the "his/her" construct. It sounds completely natural.
I'm from the south, and I'm pretty sure I recall hearing singular they used frequently when I grew up. I know I was using it back in the 2000s before all the drama against using it started. I think a large portion of the AIM/IRC/LiveJournal contingent adopted it pretty early on too.
Anyone gatekeeping this word is either extremely OCD, a total grammar Nazi (which I can't fathom - language is flexible af), or they're turning the issue into a stupid political talking point.
edit: proud to be downvoted by hateful anti-trans/anti-LGBT people. You won't win against love, though. Do what Jesus asks you: don't throw stones and love one another as yourself. I think Jesus would be pretty stoked about using singular "they" if he spoke English.
Well I think the use of "they" is wrong, it's like teaching people the wrong way, no surprise why kids these days don't know how to write and talk.
I don't mind people being different but it's no excuse to make up stupid words just so you can feel accepted or better.
> I'm from the south, and I'm pretty sure I recall hearing singular they used frequently when I grew up.
Singular “they” is well-attested as being in wide use continuously for centuries, before, during, and after the period during which the Victorian prescriptivists opposed to it in their attempt to recast English in the image of Latin held their strongest influence over firmal language. Residual opposition to it is either just the worst kind of misdirected pedantry, or reaction against the advocacy of using it for the purpose of inclusion.
This title is misleading. The actual PR is "docs: Use more appropriate language when referring to the user" and that's a fair description of these changes which clearly improve readability.
Especially since he/she is already gender-neutral.
> clearly improve readability
Not necessarily. Some people object to singular they on grammatical grounds, in that it may confuse the reader who associates the pronoun with plural meaning only into thinking it refers to some previously unmentioned group. Infamously, Monica Cellio’s dismissal was more or less over this.
I happen to prefer singular they over he/she, but I acknowledge it’s not an obviously uncontroversial choice.
They would advise to rewrite the sentence instead. The singular they appeared in the CMoS only in the 17th edition, and they approve this particular usage only in informal speech:
It's in the APA style guide (it's been there for a while now.) IMO that's even more pedantic than the "begs the question" battle which was lost some time ago.
The "singular" they always confused me as a non-native speaker, and to be honest I don't know anyone non-native who actually knows this exists and is not a mistake.
I would saw we are all "non-binary". We fall somewhere on the spectrum of gender. Some men are "alpha-males", whilst others are more "camp" [0], etc. Also see "tom-boys". I find the whole non-binary thing to be unhelpful and meaningless.
The only thing I dislike about gender-neutral pronouns in English is how they make the traditional "they" ambiguous and a bit confusing. I would've much preferred using another set of pronouns for this but I understand that adaption of such a thing is next to impossible.
> pronouns in English is how they make the traditional
How is this different from any other word? There are the odd times where it might be awkward or ambiguous to use, but I think those are the exceptions. When it happens, just reword your sentence.
>the traditional "they" ambiguous and a bit confusing
How traditional are you talking about, because the singular they has been in use since the 14th century - according to wikipedia that's only 100 years after "they" as plural
The Wikipedia article seems to cover this quite well, but I'll say it here anyway: there are several kinds of singular "they".
Using "they" to refer to a word like "someone" or "anyone", as in "If everyone minded their own business", is totally normal and has been for a very long time.
Using "they" to refer to a hypothetical or unknown person described by an ordinary noun, as in "The user must prove their identity", is common enough nowadays but I get the impression that it wasn't so common 50 or 100 years ago.
Using "they" to refer to a known person, as in "My cousin lent me their copy", is very modern and likely to confuse some people.
And worth noting for anyone who didn't read the original pull request, the case here is documentation switching references to an unknown person from "he/her" to "their" (a change which I think actually makes it easier to read).
> I would've much preferred using another set of pronouns
The difficulty there is that while natural language is flexible and ever-changing, it usually doesn't deform into a new consistent state very fast. New generally accepted pronouns might develop over time, or existing ones will change their use and meaning (like the originally plural "they" becoming accepted as a singular too from C14 onwards, and waxing & waning in that use in general use since) but if you try to create them less organically you'll find a lot of friction. As with any new standard there will be competing standards, including the status quo, and there will be people who vehemently hate each one.
> they make the traditional "they" ambiguous and a bit confusing
I'd say you're technically right. I have occasionally read to the end of a sentence and thought, "Wait, that doesn't make sense", gone back and found the reason it didn't make sense is because I interpreted "they" as referring to a singular person when the author meant it to refer to a different plural antecedent and presumably hadn't realised that it would be ambiguous for some readers. (Or perhaps the other way around.) It doesn't happen very often, though. I agree that it doesn't seem likely that people will adopt one of the neopronouns, particularly since there's not even a clear favourite amongst the various proposals.
Essentially gender serves as a simple hash for pronoun assignment. Take his sentence, where <X> is a pronoun:
When John and Mary went on a road trip <X> paid for the gas.
With gendered pronouns, John (probably) hashes to "he" and Mary (probably) to "she".
That's a decent system for simpler times and situations, but it still quickly runs up into limitations. If it is Alice and Mary on the road trip instead of John and Mary, there is no <X> that works.
I think what we need is a set of position based pronouns. I'll just call them P1, P2, P3, and so on. P1 refers to the first noun in the sentence, P2 the second, and so on.
In the first sentence, <X> would be P1 if John paid for the gas and P2 if Mary paid for it.
But that too runs into problems. Pronouns are often used to refer to nouns in prior sentences. The road trip sentence might be followed by "They picked up hitchhiker Bob who was her old neighbor", with "her" referring to Mary from the prior sentence.
I think that to make positional pronouns work, they need to count back from the position of usage rather than forward from the position of the thing the reference. So if you have two sentences with John and Mary named in the first and Bob in the second, P1 refers to John if it occurs between John and Mary, to Mary if it occurs between Mary and Bob, and to Bob if it occurs later.
That would certainly be odd at first, because the same pronoun could be used more than once in a sentence and mean different people each time:
John overthrew when P1 tossed the ball to Mary but P1 was still able to catch it.
P1 is John in part of that sentence and Mary in part of it.
In more complicated sentences this could get very confusing very fast. Imagine reading along and somewhere near the end of long paragraph you hit a P12 and had to them skim backward counting nouns. Or worse, if someone dropped a P12 in conversation.
So I think what I'd actually advocate for is the forward counting position based pronouns, but they only work within a sentence.
Its toxic because it just took up some of my attention that humans have limited capacity for and because it takes limited time from devs to participate in meaningless stuff.
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[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadOpenSSH used his/her, so already better than others that always assume the programmer is male.
So often the gender is completely irrelevant to the discussion, so just don't mention it. Use "they" or even avoid the pronoun completely and use "the user" or whatever.
The problem is in practice it doesn't work and you would end up with monstrosities like "the user should define the user's own preferences in the user's preferences file located in the user's home directory."
I never said "avoid pronouns at all costs", but rather that there are alternatives you can use if it makes sense.
As far as I know, no man has ever complained about this. Whenever I read "she" I don't feel excluded as the documentation is just giving an example. Why are the pronoun-warriors so focused on these issues?
Sounds a lot more natural than "Was he or she any good?"
They require access would imply multiple people right?
"There's a new person joining the team." "What do we need?" "They require access to the stack."
Both are obviously singular they.
"They are at the door right now, please open it asap"
You'd say:
"Someone is visiting, they are at the door right now, please open it asap"
This indeed does not sound unnatural or misleading to me anymore.
(I know you'd probably just rephrase the second sentence but this is just and example)
"They are at the door right now, please open it asap [and let a singular individual in]". If that bracketed portion is the intent, requires context. It implies a specific individual who you could identify by name or by a gendered pronoun if known (and unique in context) or description. Either way, you need to let the person you're speaking to know which "they" of the potentially many individuals at the door you want to permit in.
This context may have already been supplied. For instance, on visiting an office for an interview a name will already be supplied and the person (security, admin) doing the opening may already know the identity and that it is a singular person who is expected. In which case, "they", because of prior context, is entirely unambiguous again.
Most of the time, either the number of the noun is clear from context or you are completely fine not knowing what it is.
“They are waiting at the door for you.” Is there one of them? Is there more? Who cares, the sentence covers both!
Granted, Japanese has syntactic gadgets that enable you to add that information in a natural way in cases where you actually do care, but it’s still surprising at first how much communication works without obsessively marking every noun for number. How do Japanese, Chinese, and Korean speakers communicate without grammatical number? The same way Russian speakers communicate without grammatical definiteness, or English speakers communicate without grammatical perfectiveness, or all of them communicate without grammatical clusivity, etc.: either they mark it explicitly or—in most cases—they can perfectly well do without. It’s technically ambiguous, but only in the way every other word that isn’t marked for every grammatical category found across human languages (i.e. every single word) is ambiguous.
(In case you were wondering why speakers of Slavic languages sometimes tend to overuse “some” and “this” in English, that’s why: those are the way their native languages, lacking obligatory articles, mark nouns for definiteness when it actually matters; the overuse is what happens when you teach articles as “these weird formal words you have to use according to these weird formal rules” without telling your students that they actually bear meaning.)
For someone attempting to make an argument based on logic, you sure are missing a lot.
You attempt to create a ridiculous example just so that you can compare a flawed old example against an even more flawed new example, and say "this new way is worse, this is bad math". Logic duh amitrite?
Meanwhile you ignore the math of comparing the difference between being considerate to you vs being considerate to 50% of all humans.
It must suck being so threatened and being the only one who sees how insane everyone else is.
“The user can change settings by selecting properties. Once there, they can opt out of silly debates.”
Is there any ambiguity? Pronouns belong in places where an identity can be, well, identified. Not standalone. Sans context we don’t even know who “he” is. If it’s a real person and not a hypothetical person, use their gendered pronoun if desired.
“Jtsummers needs access. His credentials can be verified by…”
Why "they requires access" isn't fine?
It looks grammatically incorrect but the ambiguity is removed thanks to the "s" particle.
English already has similar irregularities in other contexts which seem to bother nobody.
i.e the sentence "If I were you, I'd do X and Y". The word "were" looks weird there but it solves a problem. Can't we treat "they" as singular in a similar manner?
This can introduce ambiguity, but declining to use ancient (800 years, why are we debating it still?) inclusive phrasing because some people fail to create context for their pronouns is silly.
It just isn't.
When I was learning French I quickly learnt not to question why something is right or wrong. It's wrong because the natives say it's wrong. It's as simple as that.
I just feel (citation needed) that there are more non-native English speakers than native ones and natives' opinions is no longer enough.
"They need access" - no context, ambiguous.
"They need access" while pointing towards an individual, unambiguous; while pointing toward a group of new students on the first day of school, unambiguous.
"They need access" in an email as a single line or a subject with no message body, completely ambiguous and will elicit a response of "Who needs access?" If it's part of a prior conversation chain that the recipient can recall, they'll give access to however many individuals they are aware of be it one or one hundred because it's unambiguous in the context (for them, but not for us).
French and German also use a grammatically/historically plural form for polite "you". But Italian seems to use a feminine third-person pronoun for that purpose ...
I knew it could be applied to a group in certain cases, but only when referring the group as a single unit, really still singular. Or when speaking one-to-many, where each recipient is meant to hear you to refer to themselves, though the speaker spoke to a group.
"you 12 come with me" is really still referring to a single unit to me, the group, not the individuals. IE, it conveys no more meaning than saying "you come with me" where the object might be either a person or a group equally.
It's interesting, I don't think English has a way to distinguish "me singular" vs "me a member of a plural", other than by adding other words like "you all"
Do they have grey hair? Yes, they do.
Sounds entirely natural to me.
Yes the group of old man's have grey hair.
For a start I find it telling that my comment was downvoted to -4 instantly. How can you downvote someone for stating what they do or don't find natural in their own language? Do you think I'm lying? Maybe I should start making comments about what I find natural in French instead?
You've all given examples of contexts where you don't find it unnatural. I agree with s some of them, so let me correct my original comment: it doesn't always sound natural.
> "I interviewed a developer yesterday." "Were they any good?"
This sounds OK if the gender has not yet been mentioned, but as soon as it has been mentioned it would be unnatural to use "they".
> Do they have grey hair? Yes, they do.
Also OK, until the gender has been established, as above.
> "Fin updated their profile picture"
This sounds completely unnatural to me and yes, I have noticed it. This is the same usage as in the PR in question here.
I also find it unnatural when "they" is used as the subject of a sentence in singular, like "When they travelled to London, they drank tea". If that's a single person, it sounds really jarring.
I think it's probably to do with the verb conjugation rather than the pronoun. As a French speaker you probably understand that the verb is equally, if not more, important than the pronoun. In Spanish they don't even bother with pronouns, it's all about about the verb. Unfortunately "they is" sounds totally wrong to every native speaker, so you're stuck with "they are", which is used for plural.
I don't think you're lying. I think you're unfamiliar with your native language. As a fellow native English speaker, singular they sounds perfectly natural to me and has appeared in a great deal of prose that I've read, and not just 21st century text.
Do you think the people who downvoted you are all non-native English speakers passing judgement on you?
Everything we as linguists can do is to say that x feels natural to this many people and unnatural to this many people. However, when writing something, if enough people think that something feels unnatural, maybe you should investigate if you can phrase things differently so that more people will accept it.
People feel what they feel and can't be wrong about what they feel (because it's feeling, not a rational thing).
I don't disagree with that in any way whatsoever. But it doesn't mean that the OP is fundamentally correct either. I find the phrase "he/she" to be awkward, ignoring whether it's inclusive or not (which it isn't). "He" is fundamentally gendered despite what many people want to believe and is even less inclusive (even if we assume only the male and female genders, it necessarily excludes half the population). Consequently, singular "they" ends up being the most natural way to express a non-gendered arbitrary person, especially given that English has an 800+ year tradition of using it in that sense.
That speaker has probably seen singular they countless times without raising an eyebrow, and probably used it themselves. They may report being uncomfortable with it when their attention is called to it, but that doesn't always reflect their actual usage.
You get a better understanding by analyzing a corpus than by asking people. And the corpus makes clear that a lot of people have been comfortable with singular they, for a long time. I've even seen examples of people decrying singular they in sentences using singular they.
The self-reports are also data that's informative to the linguist. But they need context to gain perspective, because they're not always identical to what the speaker generates or accepts.
Is he/she a developer -> Are they a developer?
Est il/elle un/e développeur/euse ? -> ???
I'm from the south, and I'm pretty sure I recall hearing singular they used frequently when I grew up. I know I was using it back in the 2000s before all the drama against using it started. I think a large portion of the AIM/IRC/LiveJournal contingent adopted it pretty early on too.
Anyone gatekeeping this word is either extremely OCD, a total grammar Nazi (which I can't fathom - language is flexible af), or they're turning the issue into a stupid political talking point.
edit: proud to be downvoted by hateful anti-trans/anti-LGBT people. You won't win against love, though. Do what Jesus asks you: don't throw stones and love one another as yourself. I think Jesus would be pretty stoked about using singular "they" if he spoke English.
Singular “they” is well-attested as being in wide use continuously for centuries, before, during, and after the period during which the Victorian prescriptivists opposed to it in their attempt to recast English in the image of Latin held their strongest influence over firmal language. Residual opposition to it is either just the worst kind of misdirected pedantry, or reaction against the advocacy of using it for the purpose of inclusion.
It's ridiculous, pretty happy i have nothing to do with peoples like that (not talking about queer/gay trans...but assholes)
Plus, singular they is awesome. How do you even say "he/she"?
>Plus, singular they is awesome.
That's your opinion, not a given fact.
> clearly improve readability
Not necessarily. Some people object to singular they on grammatical grounds, in that it may confuse the reader who associates the pronoun with plural meaning only into thinking it refers to some previously unmentioned group. Infamously, Monica Cellio’s dismissal was more or less over this.
I happen to prefer singular they over he/she, but I acknowledge it’s not an obviously uncontroversial choice.
http://cmosshoptalk.com/2017/04/03/chicago-style-for-the-sin...
It's in the APA style guide (it's been there for a while now.) IMO that's even more pedantic than the "begs the question" battle which was lost some time ago.
I would saw we are all "non-binary". We fall somewhere on the spectrum of gender. Some men are "alpha-males", whilst others are more "camp" [0], etc. Also see "tom-boys". I find the whole non-binary thing to be unhelpful and meaningless.
[0] hopefully these aren't offensive terms.
How is this different from any other word? There are the odd times where it might be awkward or ambiguous to use, but I think those are the exceptions. When it happens, just reword your sentence.
How traditional are you talking about, because the singular they has been in use since the 14th century - according to wikipedia that's only 100 years after "they" as plural
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Using "they" to refer to a word like "someone" or "anyone", as in "If everyone minded their own business", is totally normal and has been for a very long time.
Using "they" to refer to a hypothetical or unknown person described by an ordinary noun, as in "The user must prove their identity", is common enough nowadays but I get the impression that it wasn't so common 50 or 100 years ago.
Using "they" to refer to a known person, as in "My cousin lent me their copy", is very modern and likely to confuse some people.
The difficulty there is that while natural language is flexible and ever-changing, it usually doesn't deform into a new consistent state very fast. New generally accepted pronouns might develop over time, or existing ones will change their use and meaning (like the originally plural "they" becoming accepted as a singular too from C14 onwards, and waxing & waning in that use in general use since) but if you try to create them less organically you'll find a lot of friction. As with any new standard there will be competing standards, including the status quo, and there will be people who vehemently hate each one.
I'd say you're technically right. I have occasionally read to the end of a sentence and thought, "Wait, that doesn't make sense", gone back and found the reason it didn't make sense is because I interpreted "they" as referring to a singular person when the author meant it to refer to a different plural antecedent and presumably hadn't realised that it would be ambiguous for some readers. (Or perhaps the other way around.) It doesn't happen very often, though. I agree that it doesn't seem likely that people will adopt one of the neopronouns, particularly since there's not even a clear favourite amongst the various proposals.
That's a decent system for simpler times and situations, but it still quickly runs up into limitations. If it is Alice and Mary on the road trip instead of John and Mary, there is no <X> that works.
I think what we need is a set of position based pronouns. I'll just call them P1, P2, P3, and so on. P1 refers to the first noun in the sentence, P2 the second, and so on.
In the first sentence, <X> would be P1 if John paid for the gas and P2 if Mary paid for it.
But that too runs into problems. Pronouns are often used to refer to nouns in prior sentences. The road trip sentence might be followed by "They picked up hitchhiker Bob who was her old neighbor", with "her" referring to Mary from the prior sentence.
I think that to make positional pronouns work, they need to count back from the position of usage rather than forward from the position of the thing the reference. So if you have two sentences with John and Mary named in the first and Bob in the second, P1 refers to John if it occurs between John and Mary, to Mary if it occurs between Mary and Bob, and to Bob if it occurs later.
That would certainly be odd at first, because the same pronoun could be used more than once in a sentence and mean different people each time:
P1 is John in part of that sentence and Mary in part of it.In more complicated sentences this could get very confusing very fast. Imagine reading along and somewhere near the end of long paragraph you hit a P12 and had to them skim backward counting nouns. Or worse, if someone dropped a P12 in conversation.
So I think what I'd actually advocate for is the forward counting position based pronouns, but they only work within a sentence.
WRT "toxic", could you describe what damage this does or could do (before I just assume "majkinetor doesn't like it so it is bad" is the reasoning).