If this contention is correct (and no poster has offered any evidence to the contrary), then usage manuals and dictionaries that argue in favour of singular-they by saying “it’s been used continuously for centuries” are making a statement that is misleading at best. Future generations of apologists for “they” will have to construct alternative justifications, and will owe Mr Liberman a debt for that.

Have you looked at Hofstadher’s “Person-paper” I linked above?

His counterfactual includes Armstrong’s statement: ‘”One small step for a white, a giant step for whitekind.” This noble sentiment is anything but racist; it is simply a celebration of a glorious moment in the history of White.’

“…There is great beauty to a phrase such as “All whites are created equal.” Our forebosses who framed the Declaration of Independence well understood the poetry of our language. Think how ugly it would be to say “All persons are created equal,” or “All whites and blacks are created equal.” Besides, as any schoolwhitey can tell you, such phrases are redundant. In most contexts, it is self-evident when “white” is being used in an inclusive sense, in which case it subsumes members of the darker race just as much as fairskins.

There is nothing denigrating to black people in being subsumed under the rubric “white”-no more than under the rubric “person.” After all, white is a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow, including black. Used inclusively, the word “white” has no connotations whatsoever of race. Yet many people are hung up on this point. “

Dr. BB says:

“The decision that disagreement in gender is less problematic than disagreement in number is entirely arbitrary.”

This does not appear to me to be true. When I begin a sentence with “The tenant” there is at least a fifty percent chance that the tenant in question is male, whereas there is never a possibility that an individual tenant in a group.

Contrary to Ophelia Benson, when Isaiah Berlin et al. used “Man” to refer to the collective human race it was not “the fashion”; it was the English language and still is. Consider the following:

“Oh what a piece of work is man!” (Hamlet–note the ironic coda to the famous speech: Man delights not me–no, nor Woman either: Hamlet meant Man in its universal, R&G in its specifically masculine sense. If we rob the language of the universal “Man” we rob Shakespeare of one of his best double-entendres.)

“Of Man’s first disobedience…” (Paradise Lost–considerably ironic here as the disobedience in question was 50% the work of Eve.)

“…and justify the ways of God to man” (Pope, Essay on Man)

“Thou madest Life in Man and Brute” (Tennyson, In Memoriam)

“Poet and sculptor, do the work
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right” (Yeats)

One could go on. The point is that in addition to referring to a male individual, the word Man also refers to any member of the human race, and also to the race collectively; so do the masculine pronouns–in other words they refer not only to “vir” but also to “homo”. This has never even been questioned; read Hannah Arendt and there too one will find it on virtually every page.

I understand completely that this is distasteful to numbers of women. There are various elegant solutions to it; one can avoid singular abstract antecedents altogether (say “tenents who…”, for example).

I personally am quite sympathetic with attempts to vary the use of the abstract he with the abstract she, especially in anecdotes which conjure a particular if unnamed individual who could very well be a woman. However there is a danger with the anglo-saxonists usage of she: it could sound as if she is saying that the idea applies only to women. The reverse is not true of the masculine pronoun.

Finally, I wonder whether the advocates of gender-neutrality realize the degree to which they run the risk of weakening (I had almost said “neutering” our language. “Person of the Year” is insipid and offensive to anyone with taste. A civilized society will recognize the contributions of great women as often as those of great men; and if Toni Morrison, for example, should win the prize, it will be, for that year, Woman of the Year. But person is pallid. And there are things we cannot say without Man. Pope’s Essay on Man which I quoted from before cannot become “Essay on Humanity” without strain. And consider Armstrong’s “One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.” Take the titles of two books by Jung: “Modern Man in Search of A Soul” and “Man and His Symbols”. Try translating those without fatal weakening. “The Modern Person in Search of a Soul”? “The Person and Their Symbols”?

Every roomful of freshman composition students I’ve ever taught will always vote “more than one.”

For example: “Someone is arguing(!) about the use of they!”

Please do not take such a prescriptive view, and please do not claim generic “they” was somehow forced upon the English language as part of an anti-sexism movement — my 85-year-old great-grandmother from West Texas uses it, and so do I. And school didn’t teach either of us this usage.

I have always hated the use of ‘they’ to refer to a single subject. Not that I particularly enjoy having to write ‘his or her’ over and over in a paper, but ‘they’ just sounds wrong!

I have to say, however, that, lately, I have noticed much more of the use of ’she’ to refer to a single subject, regardless of any actual actual knowledge of the subject’s gender. A bit of linguistic affirmative action (i know, a very crude analogy) perhaps, but at least it’s arithmetically correct. What do you think of this newer trend?

Oh come on – you can’t be that blinkered. How many millions of passages are addressed to everybody rather than to sinning men yet nevertheless say he-his? Why is it worse to use female pronouns than it is to use male pronouns?

Try reading some Isaiah Berlin or (1970s-vintage) Richard Swinburne (appropriate for OUP blog!) with this thought in mind. They are addressing and discussing everybody, but they invariably and incessantly (multiple times on every page) say ‘a man’ when they mean ‘a person’ and ‘men’ when they mean people. It looks (to me anyway) positively perverse – as if they were going out of their way to be annoying (which I’m sure they weren’t – it was just the fashion). It also, oddly for philosophers, makes what they are saying significantly unclear and deceptive, which can’t have been their intention.

This idea that ‘he’ is fine while ’she’ is peculiar is not as bad but it’s still mistaken and peculiarly obtuse.

Oh come on – you can’t be that blinkered. How many millions of passages are addressed to everybody rather than to sinning men yet nevertheless say he-his? Why is it worse to use female pronouns than it is to use male pronouns?

Try reading some Isaiah Berlin or (1970s-vintage) Richard Swinburne (appropriate for OUP blog!) with this thought in mind. They are addressing and discussing everybody, but they invariably and incessantly (multiple times on every page) say ‘a man’ when they mean ‘a person’ and ‘men’ when they mean people. It looks (to me anyway) positively perverse – as if they were going out of their way to be annoying (which I’m sure they weren’t – it was just the fashion). It also, oddly for philosophers, makes what they are saying significantly unclear and deceptive, which can’t have been their intention.

This idea that ‘he’ is fine while ’she’ is peculiar is not as bad but it’s still…mistaken.

No they weren’t. Singular “they” is right up there with “ain’t” on the list of things we do not allow in English class. This might be taught now, but it certainly was not taught in the past.

“Our best dictionaries give away the truth.”

“Ain’t” used to be absent from dictionaries until about the same time as singular “they”, but that doesn’t mean it’s a new word. It’s just that dictionaries reflected standard educated usage, which until recently virulently suppressed these forms.

And as for your horror cases, they have the same kind of meaning that “indefinite” pronouns have. Nominal phrases like “the American borrower” or “a person”, like “everyone”, do not have to make reference to any actual people. In the cases you describe, they don’t. It’s when this reference is lacking that “they” naturally comes up.

The usage of “a fisherman” is an example of an indefinite whose referent irks you. That usage, for all I know, is an extension of the indefinite usage, and it might actually be new. “A fisherman” does have a specific referent, but the *identity* of that referent is unknown to the writer. The student who wrote that probably didn’t read the book very well, but their English is just fine. (THEIR English…)

Curious. If she had written “…a passage explains that no person, however depraved, if he looks at his heart…” would you have complained that the meaning was distorted, obviously thus then applying only to sinning men? Wager you wouldn’t.

The whole point of using “her” as a gender neutral pronoun is that there is no such thing as a gender neutral pronoun. Using the feminine is just shocking enough to make you notice that. If it happens often enough, perhaps you’ll get used to it — or find yourself an advocate of “they”.

I do find “they” aesthetically displeasing, but consider gender equity more important than my own sense of aesthetics.

Of Fowler’s three makeshifts, A was clumsy, B was to be used only when one couldn’t risk C (yet, he notes, B is not condemned by the OED), and C was the convention when “sex is not conspicuous or important.” If sex has become neither inconspicuous nor unimportant, then C has become risky.

After all, many a writer has opined at length on the illogicality of the double negative in English, and the impediment it poses to understanding; none of which prevents its widespread and correct use in many of the languages of continental Europe.

As for the article, Mr. Liberman is the first person I have seen to render a fairly useful contribution to the debate: he has distinguished between antecedents like “everone” and positively discordant cases in which an unambiguously singular antecedent gets a “they”. “Everyone should open their books” is wrong (I will still say “his book”) but not egregious; “tell your friend to wait and I’ll get back to them” (which I’ve heard even when the friend in question was known to be a man) is abominable.

Now can Mr. Liberman favor us with his opinion on another bit of usage? On the phone I often hear (from recorded messages of course) “Your call will be answered in the order it was recieved”. Can that be acceptable? Should it not be “in the order in which it was recieved?”

It really is hard trying to make non-sexist language comply with the rules of grammar without recasting the sentence you’re writing. Personally, I’m pissed at the abuse of exclamation points that has taken hold. It’s uncalled for and devalues the power of this punctuation mark. While I can see the reason people mess up pronoun agreement, I just don’t understand why they’ll punctuate a sentence with !!!. I may not be a great grammarian, but it seems one should know a word or sentence doesn’t become more exclamatory by adding multiple exclamation points. It just defies logic. I can only think the advent of e-mail and text messaging has caused this usage to take hold. I always think I’m reading the diary of a 4th grade schoolgirl when I see 2, 3, or more exclamation points.

In case you’re wondering, I found your article by following a link on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Cheers.