Roses are red, violets are blue, singular they predates singular you.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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People who were/are upset about singular they really don't understand that language change is pervasive and unstoppable. Shifts in pronoun agreement are no different.
Prescriptive grammarians cling to their (arbitrary) rules because they believe in a "pure" form of the language. That itself is a misunderstanding and just mirrors other common things some people do to divide the masses. Do not listen to such people.
As someone deeply engrained in the field of Linguistics for decades (personally, academically, and professionally), I can tell you that one of the biggest challenges in teaching people how language actually works is breaking down the preconceived notions they have about such things -- the exact notions those prescriptivists tout.
Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural number to a single person, you to one, instead of thou, contrary to the pure, plain, and single language of truth, thou to one, and you to more than one, which had always been used by God to men, and men to God, as well as one to another, from the oldest record of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and work upon the corrupt nature in men, brought in that false and senseless way of speaking you to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages, and hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of men;—this evil custom I had been as forward in as others, and this I was now called out of, and required to cease from.
Thomas Ellwood, ca. late 1600s.
This kind of thinking is exactly what is meant by "prescriptive grammar". It is, in many ways, not even grammar, at least not in the scientific sense.
Amusingly enough, modern day prescriptivists would now probably flag Mr. Ellwood for a run-on sentence.
People who were/are upset about singular they really don't understand that language change is pervasive and unstoppable.
What do you mean by this, exactly? As someone who is deeply "engrained" (?) in the field of linguistics, surely you must be aware that singular "they" has been in usage since the 14th century.
It has been in usage a long time -- and yet, it is still considered "improper" English by many a grammarian (though improper English is as nonexistent as Standard American English).
In the 18th century, there was a push away from singular they on the basis that it did not fit within the logic of the agreement paradigm as some understood it. Most (if not all) rules suggesting it is poor usage derive from this thinking.
But this is exactly the problem: the fact that singular they arose naturally is the point. If it does not fit within one's understanding of the agreement paradigm, then that understanding is wrong. That is the key difference between prescriptivism and descriptivism, at least in the way those are often discussed in Linguistics.
If those grammarians cared about grammar as much as they claimed, they would be seeking to better describe it and not trying to change the way that others use it. When I say that they don't understand "language change is pervasive and unstoppable", I mean that prescriptivism is naturally conservative in suggesting that one should not deviate from some particular usage; that isn't how language works.
PS- I assume your quoting is to suggest "ingrained", but I'd argue that ingrained and engrained both work in this context. Even if we disagree there, spelling isn't really about language either -- simply one possible representation of it. Given that the purpose of language is information transfer, if I had put "ngrayned" above and you had gotten my meaning, then it would have served its purpose.
I still don't get why people have such an issue calling people what they want to be called.
You don't balk at a guy or a girl named Robin, or Alex, or any of a hundred different androgynous names....
But you take issue with "he", "she", and "them"?
Why?
My only problem, and to be clear this is entirely my problem, nobody else's, is that I'm so dumb, I frequently forget and call someone he/she when they prefer they/them. I fuck it up sometimes. I try, but decades of societal norms are getting in the way of me getting it right sometimes.
To every person who identifies as they/them please forgive me because I'm going to screw it up. Just correct me when I say it and hopefully in time my brain will stop making this mistake.
Because a bunch of bad faith actors have been carefully building an outrage-generating cash machine on the idea of 'culture wars' for decades.
Culture war, race war, nationalism wars....
As long as it's not a class war, they're okay with it.
I still don't get why people have such an issue calling people what they want to be called.
Why?
Normally I’m the type to wax philosophical for a few paragraphs about what the heck may be going on in their heads, but honestly I think it’s assholes being proud to be assholes. Punching down just feels so good. That and people who are suffering enough that they don’t care about others, but don’t realize they need to work on their mental health. Or they’ve been conditioned to see doing that as a character flaw or weakness. And of course the snowball effect of those people raising the next generation of assholes, building up some inertia behind the generational trauma.
Because underlying it all, regardless of which impactful arguments they think they are making or refuting, they just don’t want to be nice to people that are different.
Fair enough. I honestly just think they can't see the forest because of all the trees in the way.
They'll cry foul on someone insisting on being called by they/them pronouns, arguing that it's an incorrect usage of they/them, or whatever the argument of the week is, then immediately use they/them pronouns for an individual in a different context without batting an eye, or even realizing what they've done.
Ignorance and hypocrisy.
By being offended I don't start calling them by their pronouns right away my brain immediately goes into defense mode and refuses to acknowledge whatever the fuck they identify as.
Fairly certain most don't get offended at genuine mistakes. It's doubling down that usually upsets people, and if you're the type to immediately go "well fuck you", I suspect that may be the case with you.
Thank you. I'm elated to hear that most don't get offended at genuine mistakes.
That's all I really needed.
Remember that it's the loud ones we hear most. If a hundred people just say nothing to avoid awkwardness, a dozen correct you politely and a single one kicks up a fuss, it's the fuss you will remember.
It's also easy to take corrections way more personally than they're intended. Someone saying "It's they, actually" isn't an expression of offense, even if it can feel bad to be corrected (because it feels bad to be "wrong"). Compare it to bumping into someone you didnt see, who then goes "watch out" to point out there's someone in the way – they're not necessarily upset, just informing you.
And finally, sometimes people are just irritable for whatever reason. They might not usually get offended, but for whatever reason will lash out that one time. To take the analogy of bumping into someone, perhaps their shoulder was already sore.
There certainly are some that do get offended. Some are so upset with the norms people grow up with they end up lashing out at those people instead. Some genuinely lack any understanding or patience for the other side of the issue. Some are just plain entitled. Some are looking for things to be upset at. Assholes exist in just about any sufficiently large grouping of people.
But for most I've known, it's really just about mutual respect, and often there's a base assumption of respect too. We all know how hard it can be to untrain a habit, and most people don't want unpleasantness. Don't let the exceptions get to you.
tbh gendered pronouns are stupid. We should call everything it.
laughs in Finnish
Yeah, realised pronouns were stupid because of finnish.
Edit: gendered pronouns
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Nah fam, we kinda shat the bed on that front
No rule in title = you must eat 196 gummy sharks,, WITHOUT A YOUTUBE VIDEO
also my homophobic mom threw away a book because the talking plant wanted to be called 'they' instead of 'it' and it's too woke for her. LITERALLY JUST A TALKING PLANT 😭
Your mom should definitely check out the monk and robot series by Becky Chambers. The first main character (the monk) uses they pronouns but the robot uses it pronouns. Your mom will love it!
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Ngl, took me a long while to get used to defaulting to "they" after a lifetime of assuming "he".
I love linguistics but it has some weird stuff in it.
Chinese doesn't have gendered pronouns in the spoken language. "He", "she", and "it" are all pronounced, “tā”. Possession and number are done by adding 的 (de) or 们 (men) after the pronoun, irrespective of gender. Originally, there was only one character for "tā", 他. In the early 20th century there were several westernization movements in China. One of them included adding gendered pronouns, in order to be able to more accurately translate English texts. Thus, 她 (she) and 它 (it) were adopted. (they used to mean other things and were repurposed). One immediate problem that people noticed was the choice of components. 他 includes the 亻component, which means "person". 她 replaces it with the 女 component, which means "female". So some linguists pointed out that this implies that women aren't people. The current situation is that people tend to use, 她, when there is a single subject who is known to be female. When it's unknown or there are multiple subjects they default to, 他 or 他们.
German is heavily gendered. You can still linguistically gender someone correctly but, in addition to pronouns, you also need to match adjectives. You also need to get comfortable with the gender of nouns often not making any logical sense. eg:
Moon - Der Mond - masculine
Girl - Das Mädel/Mädchen - neuter
Sun - Die Sonne - feminine
There's the added confusion that the third person feminine singular, is spelled and pronounced the same as the second person plural. The second person doesn't differentiate in gender but it's often impolite to use the singular so it's common to refer to males as "Sie".
Not to say that any of that is hard. Native German speakers constantly need to match the gender of adjectives to nouns so they're very used to it.
Russian seems to be more complicated. I recently read that Masha Gessen uses, "they". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha_Gessen It seems that Russian uses gendered past-tense verbs. They originally used masculine verbs out of, "hoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boy" but switched to feminine verbs as a teen and stuck with that. If anyone speaks Russian well I'd love to hear more about how gender is used and perceived in Russian. Particularly from the linguistic, rather than the cultural, perspective. It looks like Russian does have gendered pronouns https://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/pronouns.php but the Wikipedia article doesn't say which they use.
edit: clarifications and grammar
i like this comment but i feel the need to reply because it touches upon a pet peeve of mine in linguistics: there is a persistent myth in the modern period that grammatical gender is useless, pointless, or somehow arbitrary and is just some sort of vestigial, rotting, lexical limb that made it to the 21st century by fluke.
this is simply not true. just because grammatical gender often appears arbitrary or illogical doesn’t mean it actually is. and just because grammatical gender follows many, many rules does not mean there are no rules. grammatical gender is just a fairly common form of noun class system. as with most forms of noun classing, what the rules are in a given dialect can be a little wishy-washy but they are certainly not arbitrary.
for example, you point out the german Mädchen as an example of illogical noun gendering. this is an opinion often expressed by foreigners learning the language, and even by linguistically-ignorant germans. it makes sense on the face of it, this word has a similar meaning to the english phrase “little girl,” so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?
well, no. it isn’t strange and it isn’t illogical, in actuality. -chen is a diminutive in german. for those who are unaware, diminutives are suffixes/prefixes in languages that serve to make nouns feel smaller or more cute in a language. think booklet vs book or dog vs doggie for some english examples.
what are some examples of more german diminutives?
das Kätzchen - kitten
das Hündchen - puppy
das Plätzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)
das Ohrläppchen - earlobe
noticing a trend? these are all neuter! and thus we uncover a little grammatical rule that grammatical gender was trying to tell us. all diminutives are neuter.
most every “arbitrary” example of grammatical gender people provide has some sort of similar reasoning or rule behind it, some story or information it is trying to give you that makes speaking the language that much easier.
just because what it is encoding doesn’t seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesn’t mean it is not. grammatical gender is much more than just gender-washing everyday speech for kicks and does carry useful meaning, if you can be bothered to puzzle it out. attempts i’ve seen to “de-gender” spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is they’re even trying to do and often opt for rotely tearing out the entire gendered case system without offering proper lexical and linguistic infrastructure for the language to actually effectively function without it. these attempts sound clunky because they are clunky! and to be perfectly clear i’m not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts i’ve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think it’s relevant bc it showcases how modern misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is can realize as actual, negative manifestations in the non-conceptual world. why this is important to think about more than passingly!
edit:formatting
The big thing that people get wrong and which makes me so very tired is that IT'S NOT SOCIETAL GENDER, it's just a case of terrible terminology that we're stuck with. A chair isn't feminine or whatever, it's just that words related to femininity happen to be in the same class as other words.
I really wish we could all agree to call it basically anything else, like "genre" which shares the same root but doesn't create the connotation to societal gender.
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