Yeah I'm always shocked at how frequently it's used by my colleagues. I will say it is used in a lot of non-writing disciplines, but I remember my first English class putting that thing in my hands and ugh.
It's part of a broader issue in writing instruction that mistakes etiquette for style.
Amusingly, the original PEP-8 had "When writing English, Strunk and White apply" rather than "applies" (so treating "Strunk & White" as a plural). That subsequently corrected to "When writing English, follow Strunk and White".
S&W is a series of misinformed and inconsistent stylistic preferences that mediocre English majors use to status signal to other mediocre English majors.
The third-person singular "they" used to refer to specific people—officially it is a standard that all sensible right-thinking people accept. In private, I hear people complain regularly, unprompted, that it makes things unreadable, and that it is ridiculous in general.
Singular they has been used for centuries. It isn't a top-down imposition, it's a natural development of English. It is, in fact, older than singular you. If anything, the pushback against singular they is the imposition by self-appointed language lords onto people they arbitrarily decided weren't speaking correctly
Yeah I file opposition to singular they in the same place as ending sentences with prepositions or splitting infinitives. Something for pedants to get worked up over without really understanding the issue.
You're talking about a different usage than GP is. TFA explains the distinction:
> Garner tracks the evolution of the third-person-singular “they,” starting in the 1300s, when it sometimes referred to unspecified individuals. (It’s still used that way today in such sentences as “This style guide will enlighten the reader in ways they never expected.”) But only in the 21st century has “they” been applied to specific, often nonbinary, individuals—as in “Alex asked that they be given a promotion.” This usage, Garner notes, took off with the rise of the transgender-rights movement following Obergefell v. Hodges.
It may make sense to distinguish more than two usages:
1. Referring to an expression like "everyone" or "someone" (not a noun): "If everyone minded their own business". This usage goes to back to Middle English.
2. Referring to a noun that refers to a person who gender clearly cannot be known by the speaker: "This style guide will enlighten the reader in ways they never expected." This usage seems fairly traditional but I'm not sure if it goes back as far as the previous one. I rather suspect it doesn't, in which case it wasn't a good example in the passage quoted above.
3. Referring to a noun that refers to a person whose gender could be known but happens not to be known, at least not yet: "The burglar injured their hand breaking the window; we have sent blood samples to the lab for analysis."
4. Referring to a noun that refers to a person whose gender is known to the speaker but the speaker does not want to reveal the gender: "We have another witness; they saw you leaving the scene." (It takes practice to do this. I have on several occasions heard people accidentally reveal the gender when they didn't want to.)
5. Non-binary people: "Alex asked that they be given a promotion."
"They" has also long been used for individuals with known genders too. It might be considered informal, and the kind of thing that editors and style guides fuss over and "correct", but that's kind of how new words and usages enter a language.
An example from thesaurus.com:
> English speakers have been breaking new ground when it comes to they, resourcefully applying this to a specific and known singular, e.g., My best friend from high school is famous now—too bad we didn’t stay in touch after they moved to California.
I can't tell from that example what rule the speaker might be following. Are they perhaps using "they" because the listener doesn't know the friend's gender?
I came across another, different case in which a young native speaker of British English used "they" instead of "she": in talking about a hypothetical female person. I asked the speaker why they had used "they" instead of "she" (I can be annoying at times) and they helpfully explained that if they had used "she" then it would have sounded as if the person really existed. (They were talking about a sister they didn't have, or something like that.)
I think the rule is "it's okay to use they as a singular for individuals with known gender" and while that rule might not make it into styleguides (yet) I see it regularly in actual speech.
"It's okay" isn't what I mean by a "rule": I'm talking about the kind of "rule" that tells me (or any other speaker) when to use "they".
There certainly are people using "they" when they know the gender, but they don't use "they" in every case, as far as I can tell, so presumably they are following some kind of rule with conditions in it (because people don't, in practice, choose pronouns at random).
Yes. It's useful for the gender-not-specified case, and therefore has been taken up by nonbinary people.
There used to be widespread usage of "he/she" or similar in documentation that was trying to edit out the old assumption of using "he" everywhere to refer to "the user". That was always a bit clunky, and "they" reads better.
Almost everyone who used to use "neopronouns" has given up and settled for "they", as well.
6. Referring to a person whose gender may be known or not, but is completely irrelevant in a given context (most) and including it in the sentence would only introduce unnecessary noise, leaving the recipient puzzled over what relevance this piece of information has instead of focusing on the core message.
Or, historically, you defaulted to whatever the stereotypical gender role was with a preference for saying he in general (unless you were talking about a secretary or nurse).
The GP just used the word "sinister" when he/she felt that the OP's usage of the word didn't match his/her understanding of it. It's safe to say that at this point it is indeed a top-down imposition of its usage.
It seems more likely that they/their understood the GP to be projecting unrelated political grievances on this usage issue without having the courage to just utter them.
What exactly is the "top" in this top-down relationship?
It’s not unreasonable to think that whatever we say on this forum can be tracked to our real identity, and as such to our prospects of current and future employment.
I feel that other people in here might feel that saying things out the way they really think might be detrimental to their employment status and hence to their well-being. In this respect it is a top-down imposition, it is true, with the “top” not being defined as a specific person or a specific group of persons.
And going a little meta, it’s high time for the hosts of this forum to implement a delete functionality.
If you really think it's so outre you face being blackballed for having the wrong opinion then probably going on about the shadowy forces not letting you state your opinion isn't that wise either, but I think that's an absurd level of paranoia.
To be fair, the opinion could be so heinous that it would get anyone blackballed almost anywhere. A case could be made the opinion is so bad, that even implying it exists and letting the reader fantasise about how bad it is will not land them even close to the disaster that it really is.
I must admit, I've woven a hypothetical so thick I'm starting to be curious about what the opinion could be. It was meant a little tongue in cheek though :)
If we’re imagining things that would be toxic enough that a substantial chunk of employers would steer clear of you, probably unambiguous hate speech is the biggest one.
Quoting things out from an anatomy manual, for example, that can nowadays get you fired. Donating to the wrong political movements based on those beliefs/quotes/written down facts is another example, even CEOs from our industr have lost their job because of it.
The paranoia dismissal should be left out of an honest discussion.
I said our friend was trying to "insinuate something sinister;" it takes heroically motivated reasoning to read that to mean that their opinion was sinister rather than whatever conspiracy they meant to imply is happening.
So is inventing new words. Urban Dictionary much? Which do you prefer - a language that evolves to become more expressive or one that morphs into a miasma that requires disambiguation?
I think you're describing a false dichotomy. A language can become more expressive through any of these processes (e.g. neologisms or shifting meanings described before), often working in tandem.
And how does that relate to this specific example of it being ridiculous to use the ambiguous "them" as a singular pronoun instead of picking a new word? Are you saying that the use of "them" is more expressive or do you just want to abstract the issue into irrelevance?
Being more or less expressive doesn't necessarily have much to do with it. When we lost a number of verb conjugations or collapsed singular and plural second-person pronouns that didn't make the language more expressive. Arguably the opposite was true. Notwithstanding, thou dost not insist on using these archaic language features, I imagine.
> I’ve studied linguistics and English is my 2nd/3rd language and I’ve never understood what all the fuss is about.
Indeed. If any of these people complaining about pronouns were exposed to Japanese their heads would explode as soon as they tried to talk about themselves. Conversely, Finnish has always had ungendered pronouns, and Chinese only introduced them 100 years ago and then only in the written languagehttps://www.capstan.be/the-gradual-rise-of-gender-neutral-pr...
I have never heard that in private but I find it pretty easy to go online and find people carping in public with their real names attached. I guess the commissars don't have Facebook accounts.
David Foster Wallace wrote an essay on usage guides, including Garner’s, for Harper’s Magazine in 2001. It was titled “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.” Still worth reading if you enjoy—or at least can tolerate—Wallace’s own writing style:
> In Garner’s view, the best course is to “follow idiom and usage” but “otherwise apply logic.” Such advice circumvents the descriptivism-prescriptivism binary often invoked in discussions of grammar. Garner is saying, essentially, be descriptivist when you can and prescriptivist when you can’t.
I've noticed the "less" vs "fewer" issue a lot more in the last few years. I feel like we're losing that battle. I will continue to (kindly!) remind people of the difference, though. I can't help it.
It's also okay to have opinions about language of course. I just often see people confidently stating, that they're speak the right way, and those others (from that other city, country, those young people, those poor people, those black people, etc.) speak the wrong way. And it often boils down to either ignorance about how languages actual work and evolve, or just elitism/classism (or worse).
And as somebody who cares a lot about languages, this just rubs me the wrong way, and I see it so often.
Hence my previous response, pardon the snark:)
Nitpicking is unkind. Saying that you're kind about nitpicking doesn't make you kind. If you want to be kind, I recommend not nitpicking.
Language is driven by users with skin in the game, not nitpickers with dictionaries. Word use and meaning will shift naturally over time. If I say less and, given the context, you understand it to mean few, then the mission was accomplished, the mission being communication. That you understood me is an example of word use/meaning shift in action. It happens.
Ok, my attempt at self deprecating humor didn't land. I don't actually correct anyone on this, I only make hacker news comments about it. But it won't stop standing out to me.
Wasn't this rule made up by someone in the 18th century because he thought it sounded better [1]? Therefore, it's not even more correct to say fewer rather than less. The only reason to care about it is to stop people trying to correct your language usage.
I've always thought that might be an interesting feature to have in an esoteric programming language - for floats you must use the 'less than' comparison, but for integers use the 'fewer than' comparison.
I like this better than SML/NJ's 'andalso' and 'orelse' because they'd already used 'and' and 'or' for bitwise logic computations and the language disallows function overloading.
At this point, the battle is over. Any remaining resistance in the "fewer" camp had a stake driven through its heart when Lin-Manuel Miranda used "That's one less thing to worry about" in one of the most popular musicals in a decade.
As Shakespeare showed, when you're a playwright, you can change the language.
Yes of course. The difference is that he has establishment clout. Anyone who is being called to task for "misusing English" can now just quote someone who's use of English grossed $807 million.
I'm not a native English speaker. I didn't get what is wrong with the sentence
> “States were further required to limit soot from power plants, cars and other sources to 2.5 microns, or 28 times smaller than [who can be sure what this means?] the width of a human hair.”
that is quoted in the text. Should they have said "soot particles"? Or is it something else? And why can't we be sure what "28 times smaller than" means?
"28 times smaller than" (and the like) is one of my bugbears. I think it means "1/28th of the size", but then you get constructions like "three times smaller than" instead of the clearer and more obvious "one third the size of". Trying to think too hard about what it means to be "N times smaller than" becomes pretty confusing, I think.
In a newspaper, I'd rather see something like "4% of the width of a human hair", which is surely accurate enough given the variability of hair widths and clearer too.
Steve Mould, the YouTuber, has a fun takedown of the phrase "6 times colder than", and how in every reasonable interpretation it is completely meaningless.
>X Times less than. Brand Y may cost twice as much as Brand X, but that doesn’t mean Brand X is twice as cheap as Brand Y. Farburg may be two times as far away as Nearville, but that doesn’t mean Nearville is two times closer than Farburg. Big Dog may be twice the size of Little Dog, but that doesn’t mean Little Dog is two times smaller than Big Dog.
>One time is 100% of the cost, distance, size, or any other measure. If you take away “one time” something, you’ve taken away all there is. If you walk toward me and cover all the distance, you can’t get any closer—you can’t be twice as close as you were before. If the price is discounted one time or 100%, the item is free. Two times cheaper, if it means anything, might imply that the store will pay you the full price of Brand Y if you will take Brand X home with you. That mangles the meaning of cost, and it surely isn’t what the writer means.
Personally, I can see what the author is going for but I disagree that it implies the store will pay you.
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[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadIt's part of a broader issue in writing instruction that mistakes etiquette for style.
S&W is a series of misinformed and inconsistent stylistic preferences that mediocre English majors use to status signal to other mediocre English majors.
https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
> Garner tracks the evolution of the third-person-singular “they,” starting in the 1300s, when it sometimes referred to unspecified individuals. (It’s still used that way today in such sentences as “This style guide will enlighten the reader in ways they never expected.”) But only in the 21st century has “they” been applied to specific, often nonbinary, individuals—as in “Alex asked that they be given a promotion.” This usage, Garner notes, took off with the rise of the transgender-rights movement following Obergefell v. Hodges.
1. Referring to an expression like "everyone" or "someone" (not a noun): "If everyone minded their own business". This usage goes to back to Middle English.
2. Referring to a noun that refers to a person who gender clearly cannot be known by the speaker: "This style guide will enlighten the reader in ways they never expected." This usage seems fairly traditional but I'm not sure if it goes back as far as the previous one. I rather suspect it doesn't, in which case it wasn't a good example in the passage quoted above.
3. Referring to a noun that refers to a person whose gender could be known but happens not to be known, at least not yet: "The burglar injured their hand breaking the window; we have sent blood samples to the lab for analysis."
4. Referring to a noun that refers to a person whose gender is known to the speaker but the speaker does not want to reveal the gender: "We have another witness; they saw you leaving the scene." (It takes practice to do this. I have on several occasions heard people accidentally reveal the gender when they didn't want to.)
5. Non-binary people: "Alex asked that they be given a promotion."
An example from thesaurus.com:
> English speakers have been breaking new ground when it comes to they, resourcefully applying this to a specific and known singular, e.g., My best friend from high school is famous now—too bad we didn’t stay in touch after they moved to California.
I came across another, different case in which a young native speaker of British English used "they" instead of "she": in talking about a hypothetical female person. I asked the speaker why they had used "they" instead of "she" (I can be annoying at times) and they helpfully explained that if they had used "she" then it would have sounded as if the person really existed. (They were talking about a sister they didn't have, or something like that.)
"You two, stop fighting"
"But they started it!"
There certainly are people using "they" when they know the gender, but they don't use "they" in every case, as far as I can tell, so presumably they are following some kind of rule with conditions in it (because people don't, in practice, choose pronouns at random).
There used to be widespread usage of "he/she" or similar in documentation that was trying to edit out the old assumption of using "he" everywhere to refer to "the user". That was always a bit clunky, and "they" reads better.
Almost everyone who used to use "neopronouns" has given up and settled for "they", as well.
What exactly is the "top" in this top-down relationship?
I feel that other people in here might feel that saying things out the way they really think might be detrimental to their employment status and hence to their well-being. In this respect it is a top-down imposition, it is true, with the “top” not being defined as a specific person or a specific group of persons.
And going a little meta, it’s high time for the hosts of this forum to implement a delete functionality.
So you're blaming a nebulous .. them?
I must admit, I've woven a hypothetical so thick I'm starting to be curious about what the opinion could be. It was meant a little tongue in cheek though :)
The paranoia dismissal should be left out of an honest discussion.
What’s ridiculous about it specifically?
I’ve studied linguistics and English is my 2nd/3rd language and I’ve never understood what all the fuss is about.
(My native language is highly gendered and inflected and hearing the calque “they” from English still doesn’t stand out that much to me)
Indeed. If any of these people complaining about pronouns were exposed to Japanese their heads would explode as soon as they tried to talk about themselves. Conversely, Finnish has always had ungendered pronouns, and Chinese only introduced them 100 years ago and then only in the written language https://www.capstan.be/the-gradual-rise-of-gender-neutral-pr...
https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-...
> In Garner’s view, the best course is to “follow idiom and usage” but “otherwise apply logic.” Such advice circumvents the descriptivism-prescriptivism binary often invoked in discussions of grammar. Garner is saying, essentially, be descriptivist when you can and prescriptivist when you can’t.
It's also okay to have opinions about language of course. I just often see people confidently stating, that they're speak the right way, and those others (from that other city, country, those young people, those poor people, those black people, etc.) speak the wrong way. And it often boils down to either ignorance about how languages actual work and evolve, or just elitism/classism (or worse).
And as somebody who cares a lot about languages, this just rubs me the wrong way, and I see it so often. Hence my previous response, pardon the snark:)
Language is driven by users with skin in the game, not nitpickers with dictionaries. Word use and meaning will shift naturally over time. If I say less and, given the context, you understand it to mean few, then the mission was accomplished, the mission being communication. That you understood me is an example of word use/meaning shift in action. It happens.
And indeed, the writers of those dictionaries would be against the prescriptivist nitpicking, too.
[1] e.g. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/495/less-vs-fewe...
As Shakespeare showed, when you're a playwright, you can change the language.
That's for people that have never used a straight razor.
> “States were further required to limit soot from power plants, cars and other sources to 2.5 microns, or 28 times smaller than [who can be sure what this means?] the width of a human hair.”
that is quoted in the text. Should they have said "soot particles"? Or is it something else? And why can't we be sure what "28 times smaller than" means?
In a newspaper, I'd rather see something like "4% of the width of a human hair", which is surely accurate enough given the variability of hair widths and clearer too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C91gKuxutTU
>X Times less than. Brand Y may cost twice as much as Brand X, but that doesn’t mean Brand X is twice as cheap as Brand Y. Farburg may be two times as far away as Nearville, but that doesn’t mean Nearville is two times closer than Farburg. Big Dog may be twice the size of Little Dog, but that doesn’t mean Little Dog is two times smaller than Big Dog.
>One time is 100% of the cost, distance, size, or any other measure. If you take away “one time” something, you’ve taken away all there is. If you walk toward me and cover all the distance, you can’t get any closer—you can’t be twice as close as you were before. If the price is discounted one time or 100%, the item is free. Two times cheaper, if it means anything, might imply that the store will pay you the full price of Brand Y if you will take Brand X home with you. That mangles the meaning of cost, and it surely isn’t what the writer means.
Personally, I can see what the author is going for but I disagree that it implies the store will pay you.