Everyone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or Not

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Earlier this week, our linguist Geoff Nunberg told us why he chose the word gig as his word of the year for 2015. Today, he's going to talk about the word of the year chosen by the American Dialect Society. It sounds like a simple word - the word they. But the so-called singular use of they has actually been very controversial. For an example of what that singular use is, here's President Obama last night in his State of the Union address. Listen for the word they.

(SOUNDBITE SPEECH)

BARACK OBAMA: We agree that real opportunity requires every American to get the education and training they need to land a good-paying job.

GROSS: Here's Geoff's piece about the ongoing debate about whether the word they is acceptable in its use as a singular pronoun.

GEOFF NUNBERG, BYLINE: Talk about belated recognition. At its meeting in Washington, D.C., on January 7, the American Dialect Society voted to make the 600-year-old pronoun they their word of the year for 2015 - or more precisely, a particular use of that pronoun that grammarians call the singular they. This is the they that doesn't care whether it's referring to a male or a female, as in, if I get a call, tell them they can call me back or - did somebody leave their books here?

As ordinary as it is, that use of they has always been a bit disreputable. You might say it, but you wouldn't want to write it down. But now it's a pronoun whose hour has come. A few months ago, The Washington Post style guide accepted it, and it's been welcomed by people who identifies genderqueer and who feel that he and she don't necessarily exhaust all the gender possibilities. Universities allow students to select it as their pronoun and so does Facebook, so that your friends will get notices like wish them a happy birthday.

This use of they has been around for a long time. It shows up in Shakespeare, Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. Jane Austen was always saying things like everybody has their failing. But the Victorian grammarians made it a matter of schoolroom dogma that one could only say everybody has his failing, with the understanding that his stood in for both sexes. As their slogan had it, the masculine embraces the feminine. That rule wasn't really discredited until the 1970s, when the second wave feminists made the generic masculine the paradigm of sexism in language. Male critics ridiculed their complaints as a libspeak (ph) tantrum and accused them of suffering from pronoun envy. But most writers now realize that the so-called gender-neutral he is anything but. Nobody would ever say every candidate thanked his spouse, including Hillary. When you utter he, you always brings a male to mind.

But once the generic masculine fell out of favor, what were we going to replace it with? People weren't about to adopt a brand-new gender-neutral pronoun the way they'd adopted gender-neutral job descriptions. He or she was impossibly clunky. It was time to them to restore singular they to respectability. And that's been happening, even in edited books and the media.

But singular they still has its critics, and they can get pretty lofty about it. One British grammarian calls it illiterate, which always strikes me as something Diane would have said to Sam in "Cheers." A lot of people tell you it sets their teeth on edge, but they're probably not listening to themselves very attentively. Everyone uses singular they, whether they realize it or not. In an engaging recent book called "Between You & Me," the New Yorker's self-designated comma queen Mary Norris says that that use of they is just wrong. But flip back a couple of pages and you find her writing, nobody wanted to think they were not essential. If that sentence got by a New Yorker copy editor in her own book on grammar, what hope is there for anybody else? If you insist on coming down on singular they, it's best to be a little ironic about it, since you're almost certainly going to be making a hypocrite of yourself before the day is out.

The only problem with singular they is that some people still think there is one. But that's reason enough for most grammar guides to advise the readers to read around it. It's what I think of as the don't-make-trouble theory of English usage. "The Chicago Manual of Style" provides nine different strategies for achieving gender neutrality without having to resort to using they - change the subject to a plural, repeat the noun and so on. That can be prudent. Even when you know your sentence is fine, you don't want to make some pedant's morning. But if I could have back all the time I've wasted writing my way around a perfectly grammatical singular they, I could have had another book or two to my name.

Everybody seems certain that singular they will ultimately prevail, even the grammarians who disapprove of it. A lot of younger writers don't think twice about using it, and the rest tend to think of it as a pretty venial sin, the grammatical equivalent of wearing white after Labor Day.

But our pronoun controversies aren't going to subside anytime soon. English is never going to have a one-size-fits-all pronoun the way Chinese and Finnish do. We've spent the last few hundred years struggling to get out our unwieldy pronoun system to line up with our genders, and that was when everybody thought there were only two of them.

Now some genderqueer people are taking they into new grammatical territory, using it for alternative genders exactly the way you'd use a personal pronoun like he or she. The idea is that you can say Pat shrugged their shoulders or Ronnie bit off more than they could chew. That's the usage that the American Dialect Society was focusing on when they made they their word of the year. It takes quite a bit of getting used to, and it's launched a whole new conversation. But that's the advantage of having a messy pronoun system like ours. In every era, we have to keep thrashing things over.

GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, our guest will be Peter Ross Range, the author of the new book "1924: The Year That Made Hitler." It was the year Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf" while he was in prison, after a failed attempt to seize power in Munich. "Mein Kampf" is being published in Germany for the first time since it was banned at the end of World War II.

I hope you'll join us. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.