"Themself" or "thine self" or "thyself" or "theirself" all sound ok. But theirself looks incorrect written down. I would use Themself if I was writing.
Yes, it sounds better. The rest of these words sound ... not quite "barbaric", but definitely uneducated and ignorant. I'd definitely recommend avoiding them if you are writing something professional.
By what authority is this the technically correct word? Some dictionary or grammar book? Where did they get their authority to determine this?
Really the only way to decide what is "correct" where language usage is concerned is to see how people actually speak/write, AKA a descriptive approach. Do a corpus study and then you'll have some basis to make a claim about what is and isn't standard usage.
>Really the only way to decide what is "correct" where language usage is concerned is to see how people actually speak/write, AKA a descriptive approach.
This is tangentially related: the English language is a bit unusual in how flexible it is to change along with common usage. Other languages can have their usage dictated by the government; Germany, France, and Japan have all had noted language reforms that in some cases radically changed the language. That is not to say, however, that all their citizens automatically start following these reforms perfectly because lifelong habits are hard to break.
Saying I can only make a claim if I have done a certain study is somewhat absurd, especially when you are, with that suggestion, claiming to be the authority on how to determine what is correct.
And I'm sure if you asked editors at big publishing houses or english teachers, most would tell you to prefer "themselves." Themself is a new construction that hasn't caught on. Purveyors of "standard" English have to err on the side of conservatism.
I downvoted this comment because I don't think it brings anything to the discussion. I'm pretty sure it's obvious to every HN reader (and the post author themself) that "he" is the "correct" gender-unknown pronoun, along with "himself".
The submitted post is interesting because a lot of us prefer they/them for the gender-neutral 3rd person singular pronoun[0], and it raises an interesting corner case. I had to think about it for a bit, but I think "themself" sounds most natural to me.
[0] Why default to "he" when gender is unknown? Is correct number but incorrect gender better than "they", which is incorrect number but correct gender? "They" is natural to almost all native English speakers and has been used in that capacity in writing since at least Chaucer.
edit: Hm, now I wish I hadn't downvoted. Sorry about that. I suppose it's helpful for non-native HN speakers to know the "correct" word for academic writing, as much as it irritates me that that is what's considered correct.
I don't think it's necessarily obvious or common knowledge today as it would have been maybe a decade or so ago. I also don't take for granted that the author of the post knows this since he doesn't mention this current correct usage at all, even to say that it seems undesirable or unsuitable.
The above notwithstanding, i certainly don't disagree that informal English has morphed towards usage of 'they' as the general gender neutral pronoun in all cases, as I myself just had to go back and correct "they don't" to "he doesn't" in the paragraph above when referring to the writer, even though his gender is clear from his name.
However I personally have no issue with 'himself' being the correct pronoun in the singular gender neutral reflexive for formal English.
I got a lot of pushback from my thesis advisor when I was going with the gender-neutral approach. This was over 10 years ago, and not much has changed since then by the looks of it.
Today, it is technically incorrect, because society today acknowledges that women are full, living, breathing human beings and may in fact be referred to as such in polite conversation.
When you know you're referring to a woman, sure. But when the gender is unclear, it shouldn't be a feminism issue. This entire argument has always seemed ridiculous to me, and I mean really, go look at the Spanish language...
Thanks to feminist grammarians, "herself" is also correct. Or else you'll have to check your privilege, or some equally horrible fate. Though this suggests that the default gender for unknown animate third person pronouns should remain consistent throughout your entire written work. The writer should probably just pick his own gender unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise.
One such reason could be the conditional probability for the subject being male or female, depending on what you already know about him. Engineer? Him. Elementary schoolteacher? Her. Someone got a mammogram? Her. Someone got a Darwin award? Him. If the conditional probability is 50% either way, you just pick your own gender, as above.
"themself" follows the same pattern as "himself", "herself", "ourself", etc. As a commenter pointed out, "them" is frequently used as a singular object pronoun:
If a student has an inappropriate question, whatever you do, do not berate them.
corpus.byu.edu/coca/ returns 95,000 hits for "themselves" vs only 43 for "theirselves".
"If a student has an inappropriate question, whatever you do, do not berate him."
would be formally correct
edit: and your corpus search correctly shows that the plural 'themselves' is correct over 'theirselves' while having nothing to do with the discussion at hand about the singular
What are you consulting to find that the correct replacement for 'them' in formal writing is 'him' here? There isn't any College of the English Language to make authoritative prescriptive statements, and the Chicago Manual of Style at least has been against the use of 'him' here for several editions.
If you absolutely have to use one of those it would have to be 'themself'. 'their' clearly is wrong in that place because it's possessive pronoun.
The reason why 'their' can be used in the same position in the sentence is that it's used as a modifier to the object, i.e. the position in the sentence is the same but the syntax tree is different.
Does it really matter?
That's the beauty of interacting with real people rather than a computer. You can make small mistakes, and even bigger ones and people will understand you. Hell I should know I live in Spain, and my Spanish grammar is crap.
People are working on getting computers to understand small mistakes as well. There is more than one type of grammar in computer science. A generative grammar which might be used for responses can be different than a grammar that is used for recognition. The one used for recognition should understand mistakes, but the one used for responses should not.
Writer here.
The author is a programmer. An expert in formal languages. Formal languages have to be logically consistent. Not English.
"Themselves" is correct, even if it's inconsistent, because it's what most people say and understand. That's the point of a natural language. Not to be neat and orderly, but to be understood.
It's not correct because it's plural. It's correct because most people agree that it's correct. If every english speaker on earth simultaneously decided that "xivuewq" was the correct reflexive form, that's what we would use.
Now in my experience, even when people use the singular "they," most people use "themselves" as the reflexive in that context. A few might use "themself," but they are in the minority. Best to use the widely accepted "themselves" in formal writing, then.
While the use of 'them' and 'themselves' is increasingly acceptable informally, it still violates basic rules of plurality that most people agree upon, and is thus formally incorrect.
No. you're still not getting it.
Violating basic rules that everyone agrees on happens all the time. It's called irregularity, and English is full of it. Irregular plurals are common, and correct, because they have fallen into common usage.
What I'm trying to tell you is there's no formally correct in English. There's no Academy of English that tells people how to speak. What's right is what most people say. Most people say "themselves."
"Them" is a plural word in the first place, so attempting to hybridize it with the singular and form "themself" is incorrect and awkward. There is no singular "them." In the case where one uses "them" to refer to a singular subject of indeterminate gender, "them" doesn't actually become singular; rather, it's simply being used as a free variable.
It's increasingly acceptable to use "them" to refer to a singular subject when the gender is unknown. All but the strictest prescriptivists would now accept that usage. But if a writer picks "them" over "him/her," he should use it with internal, self-referential consistency.
This is the view commonly understood and immediately sensible. It's the view I was taught and grew up with, and it's the view to which I still adhere when writing (fwiw, I'm an adamant user of "himself" or "herself" for the singular). In this view, "them" is acceptable on an informal, common-usage basis.
That said, linguists in recent years have been working out formal methods of acceptance for "themselves" as a singular-referring pronoun when the gender of the subject is unknown. See my previous comments about "them" as a free variable; this is the formalist's argument for the acceptability of "them." It is an argument advanced by some of the more influential logicians of the mid to late 20th century, such as W.V.O. Quine. It's an argument based more in symbolic logic than in traditional linguistics, but it's gained a fair amount of currency in the high-nerddom of syntax. It's by no means an established or generally accepted stance, however. The general, traditionally formal rule is that "them" is always plural, and the construction "singular subject = them" is a bit like saying "1 = >1," i.e., illogical.
44 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 94.5 ms ] threadReally the only way to decide what is "correct" where language usage is concerned is to see how people actually speak/write, AKA a descriptive approach. Do a corpus study and then you'll have some basis to make a claim about what is and isn't standard usage.
This is tangentially related: the English language is a bit unusual in how flexible it is to change along with common usage. Other languages can have their usage dictated by the government; Germany, France, and Japan have all had noted language reforms that in some cases radically changed the language. That is not to say, however, that all their citizens automatically start following these reforms perfectly because lifelong habits are hard to break.
I know about the French Academy, for example. I would have assumed their influence didn't extend much beyond orthographic/spelling conventions.
^^^
Read it for your own good.
^^^
Read it for your own good
The submitted post is interesting because a lot of us prefer they/them for the gender-neutral 3rd person singular pronoun[0], and it raises an interesting corner case. I had to think about it for a bit, but I think "themself" sounds most natural to me.
[0] Why default to "he" when gender is unknown? Is correct number but incorrect gender better than "they", which is incorrect number but correct gender? "They" is natural to almost all native English speakers and has been used in that capacity in writing since at least Chaucer.
edit: Hm, now I wish I hadn't downvoted. Sorry about that. I suppose it's helpful for non-native HN speakers to know the "correct" word for academic writing, as much as it irritates me that that is what's considered correct.
The above notwithstanding, i certainly don't disagree that informal English has morphed towards usage of 'they' as the general gender neutral pronoun in all cases, as I myself just had to go back and correct "they don't" to "he doesn't" in the paragraph above when referring to the writer, even though his gender is clear from his name.
However I personally have no issue with 'himself' being the correct pronoun in the singular gender neutral reflexive for formal English.
Today, it is technically incorrect, because society today acknowledges that women are full, living, breathing human beings and may in fact be referred to as such in polite conversation.
Thanks to feminist grammarians, "herself" is also correct. Or else you'll have to check your privilege, or some equally horrible fate. Though this suggests that the default gender for unknown animate third person pronouns should remain consistent throughout your entire written work. The writer should probably just pick his own gender unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise.
One such reason could be the conditional probability for the subject being male or female, depending on what you already know about him. Engineer? Him. Elementary schoolteacher? Her. Someone got a mammogram? Her. Someone got a Darwin award? Him. If the conditional probability is 50% either way, you just pick your own gender, as above.
If a student has an inappropriate question, whatever you do, do not berate them.
corpus.byu.edu/coca/ returns 95,000 hits for "themselves" vs only 43 for "theirselves".
"If a student has an inappropriate question, whatever you do, do not berate him."
would be formally correct
edit: and your corpus search correctly shows that the plural 'themselves' is correct over 'theirselves' while having nothing to do with the discussion at hand about the singular
'them' is plural and flatly incorrect when used as a singular pronoun.
edit: Again, 'them' is formally incorrect but informally acceptable in the singular usage.
Why? How do you know this?
The reason why 'their' can be used in the same position in the sentence is that it's used as a modifier to the object, i.e. the position in the sentence is the same but the syntax tree is different.
without the rules, the language has no meaning whatsoever.
"Themselves" is correct, even if it's inconsistent, because it's what most people say and understand. That's the point of a natural language. Not to be neat and orderly, but to be understood.
It's not correct because it's plural. It's correct because most people agree that it's correct. If every english speaker on earth simultaneously decided that "xivuewq" was the correct reflexive form, that's what we would use.
Now in my experience, even when people use the singular "they," most people use "themselves" as the reflexive in that context. A few might use "themself," but they are in the minority. Best to use the widely accepted "themselves" in formal writing, then.
While the use of 'them' and 'themselves' is increasingly acceptable informally, it still violates basic rules of plurality that most people agree upon, and is thus formally incorrect.
It's increasingly acceptable to use "them" to refer to a singular subject when the gender is unknown. All but the strictest prescriptivists would now accept that usage. But if a writer picks "them" over "him/her," he should use it with internal, self-referential consistency.
exactly why it is incorrect to use in the singular.
and this is the difference between formal and informal.
there are rules that are widely accepted (formal) and then there are actual usages that are widely accepted (informal)
That said, linguists in recent years have been working out formal methods of acceptance for "themselves" as a singular-referring pronoun when the gender of the subject is unknown. See my previous comments about "them" as a free variable; this is the formalist's argument for the acceptability of "them." It is an argument advanced by some of the more influential logicians of the mid to late 20th century, such as W.V.O. Quine. It's an argument based more in symbolic logic than in traditional linguistics, but it's gained a fair amount of currency in the high-nerddom of syntax. It's by no means an established or generally accepted stance, however. The general, traditionally formal rule is that "them" is always plural, and the construction "singular subject = them" is a bit like saying "1 = >1," i.e., illogical.
I have never heard anyone say "themself" or "theirself" and both words sound incredibly awkward to me.