I suggest we stop using the cumbersome he or she, his or her, him or her. When we speak of someone whose gender we don’t know, or it doesn’t matter, we need a pronoun that doesn’t specify gender. We already have one! They, their, them is a perfectly good and ancient pronoun referring to two or more persons, animals, things, whatever. Is it a big stretch to let it refer to ONE or more?
OK, sure, the distinction between singular and plural is deeply imbedded in language, and a linguistically sensitive person may gnash their teeth when they hear this historically plural form applied to a single individual. But languages grow and change, and I think this is a worthwhile change for English to embark upon.
Some examples gleaned at random from the Internet and reformed:
“Ask questions that make your child think about what he or she just read.”
“Ask questions that make your child think about what they just read.”
“Do you tell your partner he or she is too fat for sex?”
“Do you tell your partner they are too fat for sex?”
We should still construe the word as plural, realizing that it could refer to one, two, or more people.
The Internet, by the way, is full of suggestions on this very issue, many accepting, or grudgingly tolerating, my solution. And of course rephrasing is always an option.
“OK, sure, the distinction between singular and plural is deeply imbedded in language…”
I’m not sure that’s true.
Hungarian uses the same word for he and for she (though the plural is different). So I don’t think the he/she disctinction is embedded in language, but is just a function of linguistic tradition.
I therefore think the distinction between singular and plural, too, would be a matter of which linguistic tradition you learned and not inherently embedded in language. There may well be languages that don’t distinguish. There’s some interesting general info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number#Singular_versus_plural –
it acknowledges the use of they instead of he/she in English but doesn’t give examples of that specific practice in other languages, but talks about how other languages conflate singular and plural for other purposes.
Comment by S.N. — October 23, 2010 @ 2:33 am
How about the old ye or yea? yon or thee?
Comment by sig — March 7, 2011 @ 2:41 pm
Totally agree. I’m a copyeditor by profession, and I’ve spent ridiculous amounts of time trying to render mss. gender-neutral, per my clients’ instructions, with “he/she” and other clumsy workarounds, when it would be so much easier, more elegant, and more *readable* just to use plural pronouns.
Comment by Judy Stein — April 23, 2011 @ 12:45 pm