Of course they do, especially when the number of people is ambiguous or when they are speaking about someone titled as a profession such as “I went to the doctor and they said…”
It is all a manufactured situation used to push hate and attack the marginalised. Singular they has been around for a very long time and there were options before they was they, not to mention in all the other myriad languages in the world.
Honestly I’ve always just put it down to another fault of the English language being weird. There should be a more concise word for a singular person where the gender is not defined, but there just isn’t so people use “they”.
It’s acceptable to me if the number of people isn’t known but in your case of the doctor I would not find it ideal but acceptable just because there isn’t another proper word if you don’t want to / can’t use the word he/she.
To me in an ideal world They would strictly be for multiple people or an unknown number, and another word for those who don’t identify as he/she or for cases where gender isn’t relevant like title professions and whatnot.
My MIL is one of those people who love to complain about the use of ‘they’, and my wife loves to point out when she uses it (often in the same sentence as the complaint).
The thing that really grinds my gears is the excessive use of “he/she”. Workplace training is a regular offender for this. Just use the word “they” FFS, it’s sat right there on the shelf for you.
Or don’t, just go with “he” or “she”, this fictional person in your ‘case study’ isn’t real, they don’t give a shit.
Some academic fields a decade or two ago went through a phase where they intentionally used “she” for all pronouns. The idea was because academia was so male dominated, even a neutral pronoun would still make people inagine a male lab worker, statistician, etc when reading. Intentionally using “she” was thought to force people to imagine a woman and normalise that image.
They usually only use it for unknown people though, which is why it sounds strange to them to use for a known person.
This contextual nuance is mostly lost or went over the heads of young learners today, for better or for worse. I like to think that’s why “they” was word of the year for a few dictionaries in the last decade or two, for the benefit of young and old alike.
To me it’s quite unnatural to use singular they about someone whose gender I actually know.
“There’s someone at the door”
“what does he or she want?” -nobody
You’d realistically say ‘who is it?’
“There’s someone from the water department here”
“What do they want?”
If you’re going to make any statement referring to the person, using “they” is both natural and understood by anyone.
what if their gender is they?
Yes, linguistically I find that quite unnatural as well.
I don’t mind using they / them for non-binary people. It’s just that it takes a lot of mental energy to not embarrass myself by forgetting and using the gendered pronoun.
they have half a point in that its typically only applied to people when a gender is unknown or you are referring to a group. that falls apart pretty quick though because unknown gender is barely any different from someone choosing not to identify with one. also, half a point is no good in the first place.
Is normally unknown due to not knowing the person though. Using “they” with someone known to you feels rude. As if you’re saying “I don’t include Grace in my circle, so I use “they” to keep them distant”.
It really sticks in the throat.
yeah, but there’s a difference between feeling weird and being incorrect
Chinese language is gender neutral:
他 (tā) - he/she/
it, singular
(Edit: “it” is actually “它”, but its the same pronunciation)
他们 (tā mén) - they, pluralSo simple… there’s no fuss about pronouns lmfao
Imagine all the problems that would go away if the US just used a better language xD
Mostly. The characters are gender specific. 他=male 她= female and 它 is ambiguous.
Better than some languages like German, where even inanimate objects have gender. That would be nicer though.
I remember when I was trying to learn German, one sentence the app gave got burned into my brain forever:
Der Tisch hat kein Geschlecht.
I’m sorry, but I have to disagree with the point of the table not having a gender; you just called him a man.
Das Mädchen seht am See und es sieht ihn.
The girl stands at the lake and it sees him.
In German, a lake is masculine and all diminutives are neuter, and that includes Mädchen (girl), which is a diminutive of the obsolete word “Magd” (a cognate of “maid”).
it genuinely causes confusion though, someone told me “they” (a different person), were going to be there early and I was like “they’re all going to come early?!”
‘You’ has a similar ambiguity, being a plural word originally, but most people muddle through that.
I do think we should bring back thee/thy/thou as singular, but whatever.
I wish my English teachers didn’t beat me up so hard (figuratively) as incorrect use of ‘they’ when it has a long history of usage in the singular.
I’m really curious as to how singular they started being taught as incorrect. I really don’t think it was originally intended to be transphobic.
I imagine it was fashionable at some point in the last six centuries.
It was around the 1700s, right about when “you” became a singular pronoun
“you” isn’t a pronoun at all.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pronoun If wewbull is using a different definition of pronoun than Merriam-Webster (and all dictionaries), then I guess wewbull is the one who’s correct, and not Merriam Webster.
You is a second person pronoun, it’s used in place of a proper noun. A person’s name when talking to them, in this case
And it goes back to at least Chaucer, so it’s been in recorded use for like six centuries. Most definitely not “new”.
My English teacher back in highschool was very picky about using “they” like most people do. I can hear him say “you have to use FORMAL LANGUAGE” in my head still lol
If it’s an unknown person we were told to use “he or she” instead of “they” and “his or her” instead of “their” despite the fact that no one fucking talks that way when referring to an unknown individual.
Like even saying “everyone should bring their laptop to class” would be marked wrong because “everyone” is singular so the “correct” version is “everyone should bring his or her laptop to class” which imo is way more confusing
However, he was also fine with us using masculine singular pronouns when the gender of a person wasn’t known, which I guess is kind of the case in like Spanish and some other Latin languages but still, just really weird rules
I don’t think this would’ve happened though if there hadn’t been the societal impetus that aided adoption. The singular they may have been around since Chaucer or Shakespeare - ~30 years ago, people didn’t really use it. There was far more “he or she” going on, that’s now been more commonly replaced with a “they,” also because it’s shorter. English benefits from the fact that the neutral pronoun slots right in to the existing grammar. Other languages struggle with finding such a neutral replacement because it’s more often than not a new word and a slightly altered grammatical function. English is okay on the first problem and arguably okay to mostly okay on the second.
I think singular they was still used naturally and unconsciously even when it was taught to be incorrect. People don’t naturally say “he or she”
