Except for screaming at the talking heads on TV, I\u2019ve kept quiet about it. I suppose I had hoped that it would just go away. But, it hasn\u2019t. In fact, it\u2019s spreading, multiplying, destroying hundreds of years of reason, sensibility, and logic. It\u2019s an abomination, and it\u2019s abominable. It\u2019s the singular \u201cthey.\u201d<\/p>\n
You know what I\u2019m writing about; don\u2019t pretend that this is news to you. When we went to school and made a certain grammatical mistake, teacher would underline it and write \u201cagreement\u201d in the margin. Then, we\u2019d read the sentence that we\u2019d written: If a student wants to do well, they should study. We\u2019d wonder, what\u2019s not in agreement? You ought to study if you want to do well in school.<\/p>\n
The bolder students would see the teacher after class and ask, \u201cWhat does this \u2018agreement\u2019 mean?\u201d Teacher would then place the point of a red pencil on the word \u201cstudent\u201d and say, \u201cThat\u2019s a singular noun.\u201d Then the pencil point would move to the word \u201cthey,\u201d and teacher would say, \u201cThat\u2019s a plural pronoun. The noun and pronoun must be in agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Remember that? Your parents remember. Your grandparents remember. So do your great grandparents, if they were lucky enough to go to school. If your ancestors were from Great Britain, spoke English, and were from very wealthy families, they were taught the same thing 300, 400, even 500 years ago. So, over time, our language metamorphosed.<\/p>\n
\nLanguage dynamics<\/strong><\/p>\n Language is dynamic. Most of us, including me, probably would not understand a sentence written in Middle English, our language as it was spoken between 1150 and 1500. Here is part of a 1371 epitaph from a monument at an Oxfordshire parish church:<\/p>\n \nman com & se how schal alle ded li.<\/em><\/p>\n \nTranslation:<\/strong> Man, come and see how all dead men shall lie.<\/p>\n And further:<\/p>\n \nyis graue lys John ye smyth god yif his soule hewn grit.<\/em><\/p>\n \nTranslation:<\/strong> Under this grave lies John the smith; God give his soul heavenly peace.<\/p>\n If we wind the clock back even further to the period when Old English was used, we\u2019d find hardly any semblance to modern English. Here is an inscription from an archway to the grounds of the 10th century St. Mary\u2019s parish church in Breamore, Hampshire:<\/p>\n \nHer swutela\u00f4 seo gecwydraednes \u00f4e<\/em><\/p>\n \nTranslation:<\/strong> Here is manifested the Word to thee.<\/p>\n Even when we wind the clock forward to the time when the Constitution of the United States was written, we find spellings and capitalization that differ from current practice. Here is the way that the original preamble was written in 1787:<\/p>\n \u201cWe the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.<\/p>\n Today, we would not capitalize Order, Union, Justice, Tranquility, Welfare, Blessings, Liberty, or Posterity. And we now spell the word that follows \u201ccommon\u201d in this way: defense.<\/p>\n Influencing change<\/strong><\/p>\n For the past few decades, at least two innovations have been stimulating a transformation of our language. In historical sequence, the first was probably the computer; the second, political correctness. And, in both cases, I think that a change in the way that we think about things has been accompanied by the way we talk and write about them.<\/p>\n Computers not only added new words (bit, byte), but also new ways of thinking about things (reboot, Ethernet). Because computers process data as binary digits, a portmanteau (bit, for binary digit) developed, and a neologism (new word: byte) was introduced to indicate a series of eight binary digits (in the coding system used by IBM, 11000101 is the letter \u201cE\u201d).<\/p>\n Some changes, due to computerese, have worked their way into our language and have hardly been noticed by the general public. For example, a common wall switch used to read \u201cOn\/Off.\u201d Now, a switch that accomplishes the same end reads \u201cl\/0,\u201d which most people refer to as an \u201cI\/O switch.\u201d However, the notation on the switch is made up of the two binary digits, one and zero, with the \u201c1\u201d indicating an \u201con\u201d position.<\/p>\n These changes are simply due to technological advances. The use of the singular \u201cthey,\u201d however, is due to a reconstruction of our social awareness.<\/p>\n Political correctness<\/strong><\/p>\n Many years ago, some people became conscious that a lot of our sentence constructions (and, perhaps, our ways of thinking) were male-oriented. When the late Elbert Stewart and I submitted our manuscript for a chapter on culture to our publisher, we started with a quotation from the 16th-17th century poet John Dunne:<\/p>\n \nNo man is an island,<\/em><\/p>\n \nEntire of itself,<\/em><\/p>\n \nEvery man is a piece of the continent,<\/em><\/p>\n \nA part of the main.<\/em><\/p>\n Our editor sent the manuscript out to a number of respected sociologists for pre-publication review. One critic crossed out the word \u201cman\u201d and wrote in \u201cperson.\u201d Well, regardless of how one feels about being gender neutral, we can\u2019t change the words Donne wrote. So, we picked a different quotation that made the same point.<\/p>\n Moreover, we were careful not to make the grammatical mistake with which I started today\u2019s column. Relying on Strunk and White\u2019s \u201cThe Elements of Style,\u201d which has been considered to be the \u201cBible\u201d of language usage since its first appearance in the 1930s, we pluralized any nouns that would later be referenced by a pronoun. The authors recommended this tactic even though the \u201cuse of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical. convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language.\u201d<\/p>\n However, it is likely that the singular \u201cthey\u201d is here to stay. Actually, it is a resurrection of the form that was used in the 14th century. Still, neither the Publication Manual of the APA nor the Chicago Manual of Style, two of the most widely accepted standards of English usage, has given expressed acceptance of the practice. But, the MLA (Modern Language Association) Handbook neither endorses nor disallows the use of the singular \u201cthey,\u201d and this has been the most favorable official position on the topic so far.<\/p>\n However, even if all three sources were to accept this centuries-old use of the pronoun, I\u2019d probably still be screaming at the news reporters on my television.<\/p>\n \u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n \nJim Glynn may be contacted at j_glynn@att.net.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Except for screaming at the talking heads on TV, I\u2019ve kept quiet about it. I suppose I had hoped that it would just go away. But, it hasn\u2019t. In fact, it\u2019s spreading, multiplying, destroying hundreds of years of reason, sensibility, and logic. It\u2019s an abomination, and it\u2019s abominable. It\u2019s the singular \u201cthey.\u201d You know what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_theme","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_angie_page":false,"page_builder":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[32,52],"class_list":["post-7061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-culture","tag-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maderatribune.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}