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

No Apostrophes for You!

Okay, I give in.

I've just seen too much, and I realise this problem cannot be fixed, so it must be removed.

People can't deal with apostrophes.  They just can't.  Oh, sure, some of us can - and we are so very hung-up about it - but the general population of the English speaking world just can't wrap their heads around them.

Specifically, they don't know when not to use them.

I grow weary of all of the signs and assignments I have seen where people clearly don't know when they should or should not put an apostrophe before an s.  Some times they neglect to use one when they should us it, but most of the time they use one when they shouldn't.

And, as a final straw, last night I saw a sign (that had been photocopied multiple times and plastered all over a particular space) that spelled "your" (as in "your cooperation is appreciated") as "you'r"

You'r.

This must stop.

The way I say it, there are two options:  we can either continue to give people an opportunity to fail, and then continue to get annoyed with them when they get it wrong...

Or we can take away the apostrophes.

You can't stuff up apostrophes if you just don't use them.

This is language and spelling reform - and I know English speakers in general are against it.  They like to believe their language is perfect and unspoiled - born that way and never changing (thus ensuring that all of the many constant changes that occur in our language happen completely by accident, rather than design).

But the fact of the matter is that sometimes we have to stand up and say "You know what?  This word would make more sense if we stopped spelling it with that letter/punctuation mark/whatever".

The Americans did it with their Webster's Dictionary.  They managed to lose a bunch of silent letters and use z instead of s when the sound called for it.

It must become standard and normal for apostrophes to simply not appear in texts.  Those of us who still insist on spelling things according to the traditional British model are probably anal retentive enough to know what apostrophes are for, so there will be no approbation against people who chose to continue using them (although the wrath of a thousand pedants will fall upon the heads of those who continue to use them incorrectly - myself, unfortunately, one of the people who know better but still trip up occasionally).

But the rest of the world should be able to breathe easy, knowing that they will never get it wrong if they simply never use them.

AskOxford

I'm currently filching my old posts from a blog that's about to die and moving them into my current blogs, and I realised this one wouldn't really fit on any of them. So I'm putting it here:

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm including a link to this page because, as a 'dictionary freak' (as most of my friends call me), I think it's just marvelous.

I don't know how relevant it will be to your studies, but the AskOxford FAQ's page is chock-full of interesting things.

You know all those word-puzzles that people like to give you about words that rhyme with orange or end with gry? You'll find a lot of the answers here.