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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Just a thought while we're on the subject of the expansion of you , how do people feel about the expanding use of they/them/their as an indefinite 3rd person singular pronoun, e.g., Each student should check their work carefully and correct their own mistakes.
Bingley
Bingley
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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>how do people feel about the expanding use of they/them/their as an indefinite 3rd person singular pronoun
I certainly use this form in writing. I have written some "how to" books and avoid at all costs using his/her. I feel very comfortable with your example - "Each student should check their work carefully and correct their own mistakes". Some people would accuse it of being impersonal but I think that it is neutral and the rest of the writing can carry the responsibilty for sounding friendly.
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newbie
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newbie
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Yes, a perennial. One obvious solution (and my science students like cut and dried solutions), is to use plurals - not of course always the meaning one wishes to convey. But there is a move among grammarians/linguists in Australia to simply accept that their/they are third person singular non-gender specific pronouns. I'm sure that it will come. My aging Macquarie Dictionary (the Oz OED) says that it is 'usually considered to be bad usage', BUT I think that I've read that the Macquarie editors are thinking of accepting what is (arguably) inevitable. Does any-one have any info on this?
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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i believe "their" is listed as singular in the oxford dictionary these days. i did read that it should be avoided in formal writing but it's okay in conversation somewhere (which sounded odd at the time). i'm for it. it sounds fine. but everyone should follow their own feelings maybe.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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okay, I'm going to play devil's advocate (even though I'm an adiabolist) and ask the obvious question:
what makes distorting the meaning of 'they' by making it singular better than distorting the meaning of 'his' by making it neutral?
e.g., everyone should follow his own feelings vs. everyone should follow their own feelings (or, in the first case, as discussed elsewhere, the speaker/author can use her personal pronoun).
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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tsuwm
HA!
there is no greater stretch in terms of stretches.
it's just that when one group becomes the default neutral then the other group becomes the default unrecognised.
plural just happens to cover everyone and is thus fairer.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>>okay, I'm going to play devil's advocate (even though I'm an adiabolist) and ask the obvious question: what makes distorting the meaning of 'they' by making it singular better than distorting the meaning of 'his' by making it neutral?<< First, 'play'fully--what do you mean, play devil's advocate?? Serious, now--Tsuwm, you have just caused me to go thru a thinking process that led to an embarrassing realization. I have always been taught to object to using their as a singular. But I have always accepted his as a neutral, because that was already in place (in use) when I was in school. Seemed just fine to me, that's the way things were. But your post made me realize (again) that the world did not begin with my birth! I imagine that when his first crept into use as a singular, there were probably rantings against this, just as in my school days there were rantings against using their as a singular, and...  just as I now rant against using 'guys' to address females! ...and the language goes on...
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old hand
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old hand
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Well, if we're now allowed to use they as singular then the ACT is wrong. In my past year of schooling we've gone over a large bit of grammar, including much concerning the ACT and SAT. I've been told that if you're going to use singular in a sentence, such as Bingley's example, it should be written as "Each student should check his or her work carefully and correct their own mistakes." I think it sounds a little awkward myself, but yes, we're supposed to use "his or her" rather than "their." Now, we can use just "his" or just "her", but it's considered politically correct to alternate. Of course, we can also use "one" as in "One should be careful about what one is saying."
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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>the ACT is wrong
Sounds fine by me. Pillars of education need to be kept in their place as followers not leaders! By the way what is ACT?
That wasn't meant to be as rude as it sounded - I went to UCL which you may not have heard of either.
I do find the idea of alternating his/her supremely silly. Its only the kind of idea that only an academic could come up with as a solution. Do people use him/her alternately in normal speech - hardly. I occasionally use "one" and always sound as if I've stepped off the ark. Whole sections of the community may well have never heard the term "one"!
A message for your tutors - get real! It might lose you a few marks but then surely education is about formulating arguments not just lamely accepting an arbitrary ruling. You can tell that I'm a child of the sixties, just wasn't made for conforming!
Footnote: I've now looked up the ACT. It looks like it is a college entrance examination. In which case I can see that an exam which is open to a wide range of people tends to lag current thinking, otherwise they would never be able to set a standard. I always found this to be a problem of school-level English language. It was always taught as if there were absolute rules. The better student was often marked down for failing to conform to the average. There is an earlier discussion of times when we felt that teachers had misunderstood our contributions. The simple answer is stick to mathematics. 1=1, 2=2,
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addict
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addict
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>>i believe "their" is listed as singular in the oxford dictionary these days. i did read that it should be avoided in formal writing but it's okay in conversation somewhere (which sounded odd at the time).<<
My Oxford Dictionary is too old to check this out, but I think I've heard the same story that the 'authorities' are starting to accept this usage.
As for 'it should be avoided in formal writing but it's okay in conversation', this is how language evolves. Speech is living and 'realtime' - writing of its very nature is slower and lags behind. So an innovation or evolution is accepted orally first and in writing later.
I suspect the web may be changing this balance - you only need to look at what is acceptable punctuation / grammar in email / discussion board versus traditional standards for writing letters to see how the pressure on writing to be 'realtime' too is changing it.
Your lack of capitals is a case in point. No problem whatsoever to me on this board, but if you'd put it in a formal letter (or even a formal email) I'd probably react differently. Formal communication is more considered and polished and its rules just change much more slowly.
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