ALT TEXT:
- Panel 1: A person with the text “Singular ‘they’” written on them smiling with open arms.
- Panel 2: “Singular ‘They’” beaten up by others who said, “Singular they is ungrammatical. It’s too confusing,” “How can anyone use plural pronouns for singular,” and “Every pronoun should only have one purpose.”
- Panel 3: “You” hiding from the mob who was beating “Singular ‘They’”
- Panel 4: “German ‘Sie’” hiding with even more fear next to “You”
The only “issue” with singular they, and really its just more a clarification hiccup, is when you have a group that includes a person using they/them pronouns, it’s a little clunky specifying you mean the individual rather than the full group and vice versa.
Yeah, but that’s also an issue with “you”. I’d say make a new pronoun but that’s a whole other set of pains (e.g. I don’t like xe/xem because it looks bad, doesn’t fit with standard english. ze/zem is better or even something like ke or ge).
Hell, I’d be all for moving to an official constructed language for international communication but that’s a whole other other set of problems (who makes it, what should it be based on and how do we make it fair, how to get people to use it).
Basically there’s no good solution to language problems because prescriptivism doesn’t work and all languages suck in some ways.
For “you”, I’m glad I speak a dialect/accent with " y’all" so I don’t even run into that issue on the daily.
They is not just used to refer to singular people when they don’t use he/she pronouns. It’s literally been used as singular for hundreds of years.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html
I know, I’m speaking to the only potential use of a singular “they” actually being potentially “confusing”, which I demonstrate is really minor. Supporting the point of the post and yours that there’s no real serious issue anyone can have with the singular “they”.
You can always use context clues. For example you go they for singular and they all for group.
But that’s the hiccup, point in case; you have to stop for probably just a split second to create the distinction of “they” versus “they all/they both/ both of them/all of them” with singular versus plural. Which again isn’t hard, and people should just get used to it till it’s not any longer.
A lot of people I know use either no or they pronouns. If there would ever arise a weird scenario where it is unclear if I were referring to one specific person or the group, I could still just use their name.
Even with cis people I often try to use their name more instead of pronouns. But this is because I mostly speak German and there is no native they I could use, so using the name makes it neutral. A lot of trans/nb people use they (or dey) in German, too ;)
“all of them”
“them all”
We can adapt.
Yep agreed, the point was that people will tend towards the shorter “them” first, which may cause some initial confusion followed shortly with a “oh I meant them (singular)/ all of them”. Again thats really the only real " issue if you can call it that even to using the singular “they”