Pronouns – the singular “they”
I have given my students the job of finding, within their lifetimes, a gender neutral pronoun other than the Queen’s one. Some suggestions have been thon, heer, ha, hs, hiser, shhe, and s/he. Though these might be logical, they don’t quite fit phonetically. We’ll have to try harder.
How would you rewrite the C. S. Lewis sentence cited in the blog Motivated Grammar in a post that discusses this issue at greater length, “She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes.” The same scene can be described without the their trap, but it would lose its style and spice.
There are band-aid fixes to this problem. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (1999) suggests avoiding the wordy choice of saying, over and over, he or she or him or her by turning a sentence into the plural: A doctor always bills his patients becomes Doctors always bill their patients. But I wouldn’t want to advise my students to turn all their general statements into plural sentences. We want them to use the widest possible stylistic palate, don’t we? Wouldn’t we like them to write as well as C. S. Lewis?
We must think further about this, but perhaps the solution is in our attitude — maybe they/them/their must join you/your/your as a plural and singular pronoun. At the very least, teachers should not react as if they had been shot in the heart when a student uses the singular they.
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