God used singular "they"

[lo5an]

So, it's old news that Shakespeare used "they" with singular antecedants in his writing. But, if you find yourself in an argument where even more counter-pedantry is called for, it looks like God used it too.

(as an aside, I'm really happy with the term "counter-pedantry")

Comments

[detonate_for_me]

I won't say it's grammatically incorrect--I encourage my friends to end sentences with prepositions if they want to. :D

But I cannot bear it. Seeing ". . . whether a person perceives themselves as fat" hurts my head. I would say "whether a person perceives him- or herself as fat" or "whether people perceive themselves as fat".

[lo5an]

More people should be encouraged to ignore rules of Latin style when speaking English :-)

I go the other way, aesthetically. I'd prefer to see the "they". It depends on the sentence, but "he or she", "him or her", et al. usually seem much more awkward to me.

[lo5an]

I gotta be me :-)

[outotoro]

Actually, I think "they" and "their" should be considered appropriate when it is refering to a singular entity out of a collective group. In the cases from Scripture - you have a collective (your neighbors) - and one instance of them is still properly a "them". =o)

[lo5an]

The page I link to quotes Deuteronomy (analyzed in a previous Language Log post: Then shalt thou bring forth that man, or that woman (which haue committed that wicked thing) vnto thy gates, euen that man, or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones till they die.
That's pretty much the exact usage that is commonly railed againse, where "they" is used as a gender nonspecific singular pronoun.

You could parse the quote as using they to pick out a singular member from amongst the group of "that man, or that woman", but I think that pretty much opens the door to applying that interpretation generally to the gender nonspecific singular usage.

[lovimoment]

You would have to pick the morbid stoning passage...ugh. (Although there are quite a few of them...)

My mom told me her English professor in college was fond of a pronoun she invented herself (or else someone else invented it, but she was one of the few who used it): co. As in, "That shalt bring forth that man, or that woman (which haue committed that wicked thing) vnto thy gates, euen that man, or that woman, and shalt stone co with stones till co dies." Totally gender neutral.

[lo5an]

That's better than a lot of the attempts at pronoun coinage that I've seen, I guess. The problem is getting widespread adoption. We'd have to make pronoun reform a priority and I just don't think that this country is ready for that :-P