More on Singular “They”
Geoffrey K. Pullum at Language Log explains how usage of the singular “they” works and why it is grammatically sound. The discussion was prompted by a statement made by President Obama during the Henry Louis Gates affair in Cambridge last year. Obama said:
. . . the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.
Pullum explains:
Obama was trying to make a general claim about the stupidity of arresting some person x when there was already proof that x was in x‘s own home. The x in this paraphrase is intended as what a logician would call a bound variable. The issue at hand is which pronoun to use when expressing the same content in English. Now, Obama wasn’t intending to limit himself to the claim that arresting Professor Gates was stupid. Doubtless he would think that arresting Harvard president Drew Faust in her own home, if she got snippy after she had shown her driver’s license, would also be stupid — unless she had clearly committed an arrestable crime. And in contemporary Standard English, with antecedents like somebody or everyone or any citizen, people typically use the pronoun they for “bound variable” meanings in this sort of syntactic situation.
Strunk and White baldly assert that this is an error. They simply say don’t use they with syntactically singular antecedents like somebody. They don’t give a reason; and it is pretty clear they didn’t know anything much about the literary evidence that they has been grammatical and normal with singular antecedents for six or seven centuries. Strunk and White are just wrong about Standard English syntax, here as nearly everywhere else where they deal with grammar in their book The Elements of Style.
Of course, you have a perfect right to hold the opinion that they with a singular antecedent seems distasteful or ugly to you. In that case I would advise you not to use it. But don’t call it a grammatical error, because it clearly isn’t one, and never has been. Don’t say that it betokens a breakdown in our ability to tell singular from plural, because it doesn’t.
(Formatting in original.) So, the next time someone gets snooty about singular “they,” you can tell them that they are out of touch with six or seven hundred years’ worth of accepted usage.
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