No More Moral Outrage at "Bad" Grammar!

There occasionally comes a time when the current vocabulary or grammar rules of a language require change, due to technological or social changes in the population using that language. Hundreds of years ago, grammarians decided changes were needed to make English more like the scholarly Latin, and more recently, gendered nouns such as "postman," "chairman," and "mankind" are being replaced with politically correct gender-neutral terms ("letter carrier," "chair," "humankind"). These changes faced some grumbling opposition, but not the same degree of controversy as the many terms now used to as the gender-neutral third person singular pronoun. Decreed "he" several centuries ago for clarity (and reflecting the gender inequality of the time), the pronoun is now written as many different terms: "he," "s/he," "his or her," and other original terms. Because of the changing social climate regarding gender equality, a standard modification is necessary for this term; many invented terms have been suggested ("hir," "ey," etc.), but they don't naturally occur in the language and are criticized by the majority of English speakers. Although the use of the third person plural pronouns ("they," "them," "their") is a common way to overcome the problem, it is deemed by many traditionalists and grammarians as atrocious. Nevertheless, because there is a need for change and this method arose naturally, I would advocate for the use of the plural counterpart where no gender- neutral third person singular pronoun is available.

If the standard prescriptive rules of English were to allow this practice, almost everyone would find it easy to make the switch, and indeed many people employ this tactic already, especially in familiar speech. The main problem would be convincing English language purists of the acceptibility of this change. For many, a sentence such as "Nobody wants to face their own flaws" appears to contain an unacceptable error, perhaps even a pet peeve. I have heard countless complaints about this so-called error, but none about previously accepted pronoun changes‹for example, no one complains misses the old pronoun "ye." If the "they"/"them" substitution takes hold, which would not be a surprise, the controversy would soon go the way of "thee" and "thou." These things happen. There is nothing inherently wrong with using the same pronoun for several different cases‹take German, where the second and third person plural pronouns sometimes share forms with the third person singular (e.g. "sein"). Furthermore, languages which indicate case by word order, like English, often have no case differences in pronouns, sometimes even between types. Amid the many possible sets of grammar rules, why wouldn't it be acceptable to use the same word for two purposes? Only if it is necessary to preserve the tradition of the language‹but because of changing linguistic needs, the old rule does not necessarily need to be salvaged. Many English speakers have dependently or independently begun to use "they" as a solution to this new problem, and I believe these people should continue doing what is already comfortable.

Coming soon: "Hopefully" & "Literally"

 

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