Singular Plurals (Or, The Polite "They")

I've been sitting on the fence regarding the use of "they" as a gender neutral singular third person pronoun.

On the one hand, the English language desperately needs a gender neutral singular third person pronoun.  I mean, we have one, but we also insist that "it" can't be used for people without being exceptionally rude and insulting, so we need one fit for polite society.

But on the other hand, I wasn't keen on the idea of weakening the "plurality" of "they".  We've already lost a distinction between singular and plural with our second person pronouns when we stopped using "thou"...

But I recently had an epiphany.  You see, the plural "you" was always used to refer to single individuals.

Back in the day, English had two ways* of referring to someone in the second person.  There was "you", which was plural, and "thou", which was singular.  This is actually pretty bog standard in most languages I know of, so I don't rightly know why we stopped doing this.

The other thing that was "bog standard" was the fact that you would use the plural word to refer to individuals if you were being polite.  You (Sie, vous, teie, etc) is used when speaking to one person, even though the word is plural, because it doubles as the polite form.  You would use this when talking to someone you weren't on first-name basis with, or someone you might refer to as "sir" or "madam".**

The singular form, thou (du, tu, sina, etc) is used when talking to someone you don't have to be polite to - like someone who is of a lower social standing than you (and everyone knows it) or, more commonly these days, family and friends.

"Thou" is not just a marker of singularity, but also familiarity.

It wasn't just a matter of pronouns, either.  The entire verb structure altered to say "we know each other well".  Think about that the next time you hear the old hymn "Be Thou My Vision" ("nought be all else to me, save that Thou art"), and others like it.  That way of speaking wasn't a marker of great respect, but of great closeness.

In many languages, it's still a gesture of friendship to be told "you can 'thou' me", and you wouldn't dream of calling someone "thou" if you weren't on close terms.

Anyway, the thing that occurred to me is that there is no reason why third person pronouns couldn't work the same way; we could use the plural version ("they") to refer to people we don't know well as a mark of politeness (or neutrality), and singular versions ("he", "she", etc), as a mark of familiarity.

So, when talking to someone about a friend, you would feel perfectly comfortable saying "he went there on his own", but if that person wasn't also friends with your friend, they would say "Oh, did they enjoy it?" and that would be perfectly normal.

When you think about it that way, using "they" as a singular word isn't really "losing" anything, but regaining something we've lost elsewhere.

Plus, it would be really handy.


*Actually, we once had three, but that's out of the purview of this post
**More on this later

Where's all the female superhero merchandise?

I'm posting this TED Talk on literally every platform I use, because everything this guy says is spot on.

We're living in a media saturated world that is choosing to show us only what it wants to sell us, and no one is selling the female heroes.

We've got the unfortunate situation where the female characters are being removed or replaced... except for the exceptionally girly crap.  But if we don't vote with our wallets and make a point of buying everything with a girl hero in it (for ourselves as well as our daughters AND SONS), then we won't get anything better.

The Yurt's revenge (or, More on the Yurt Game)

I was speaking to a group of people about the Yurt Game the other day, and they all immediately launched into a game of Desert Island Books, as if that what the Yurt Game must have been about.

While it was interesting listening to them talk about What Three Books they would like to have with them if they could only ever have access to those books for the entire time they were stranded, that wasn't the point of the Yurt Game.

In the Yurt Game, you're not cut off from any and all other reading material.  There's no reason to suppose you'll never read any other books for the entire time you are in the yurt.

No, the point of the Yurt Game is to consider the ownership of physical books.

If space is at a premium, and nothing can warrant a place in your home unless it is important or meaningful to you in that physical form, what books do you keep?

Forget about what you want to read.  What books are important to you as artefacts?  Or as books you never want to be without?  You feel you must be able to go back to them at any time, and be able to dip in and out of them at your leisure.  You feel you must be able to hold them in your hands and know that they are real and solid and with you. Or you just feel your home would not be complete without these books sitting on your shelves?

I have to admit, in the two years since I wrote the original post on the Yurt Game, I've come to a point in my life where I'm not sure I'd really want or care about anything other than a couple of sets of dictionaries, two or three cookbooks, an atlas and a couple of books I have that outline the rules of various games and sports.

Oh, there are a few books I'd definitely keep for sentimental value - like the books my grandmother bought me as a child - and a couple that I've re-read a few times and may keep just because I'm likely to read them again...

But, all told, I'm not sure how many books I currently own would have a place in my yurt.  And yet I have soooooo many boooooks!

I packed them all up recently because I was cleaning out a room and thought I might be moving house shortly.  Now I have to put them back, I'm wondering why I have so many.

But, do I have the guts to part with them?  Ah, that's the question.