Avoid the singular “they”

A pronoun, in the lyrics of Kathy Mandary for Schoolhouse Rock, is a word that “was made to take the place of a noun”; we use pronouns instead of repeating a noun because “saying all those nouns over and over can really wear [us] down”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZFca8AkT0. Furthermore, the first rule of pronouns, according to the Purdue OWL, is that they agree in number: “If the pronoun takes the place of a singular noun, you have to use a singular pronoun”: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/595/1/. This noun that is being replaced by a pronoun is called an antecedent.

In addition to rule number one, pronouns should also their antecedents in gender, person, and case. For example, if I say, “My mother baked a pie,” I would follow it with “SHE made a Dutch apple.” I would not say “THEY made a Dutch apple,” as my mother is only one person. I would not say “HE made a Dutch apple,” as my mother identifies as a woman. I would not say, “I made a Dutch apple” or “YOU made a Dutch apple,” as “My mother” is in the third person. I am not my mother, and I cannot assume that you, the person reading this, are my mother, so I must choose the third over the first or second person. Finally, I would not say “HER made a Dutch apple,” as my mother is the subject of the sentence; she is the one who made the pie, she is the subject of the sentence, so I must use the subjective case.

To repeat, a pronoun and its antecedent should agree.

Of course, some pronouns have no antecedent. These are called indefinite pronouns. For example, when I say “My mother baked a pie. She made a Dutch apple,” it’s clear that the word “she” in the second sentence refers back to “My mother” in the first. However, in the sentence, “Everyone should listen to Michael Penn,” the word “everyone” does not need a noun before it to clarify exactly whom I mean. Indefinite pronouns are vague, by design, and lack the specificity that pronouns acquire when they clearly refer to an antecedent.
The pronoun “they” is plural. It should therefore be used to refer to more than one person or thing. To refer to a singular person or thing, the pronouns “he” or “she” should be used. However, some confusion occurs when a singular antecedent lacks a clearly identified gender. For example, in the sentence “One person forgot to sign the registration form,” it is unclear whether this person identifies as male or female. In the sentence, “Anyone who forgot to sign the form will not be registered,” again, the pronoun “anyone” does not appear to identify with any particular gender.

In such cases, some writers—not wanting to erroneously apply “he” or “she”—opt instead to use a plural pronoun that does not specify one gender or another. For example, they will write “One person forgot to sign their registration form” or “Anyone who forgot to sign their forms will not be registered.” I do not necessarily see this as a valid solution. Why complicate the number in an attempt to avoid complicating the gender? The Chicago Manual of Style agrees, stating that even though “it has become common in speech and in informal writing to substitute the third-person plural pronouns they, them, their, and themselves, and the nonstandard singular themselves . . . it is still considered ungrammatical in formal writing” (Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, (2010): 5.46). Instead, the manual suggests one “use the traditional, formal he or she, him or her, his or her, himself or herself.” Thus, one identifies as either a “he,” a “she,” or an “it,” since the English language has no third person singular gender neutral pronoun; that is, unless one counts the indefinite pronoun “one.” Thus, while I am not a fan of the “he or she” construction (although I do admire how it unmistakably avoids sexist language), I do recognize the need for a pronoun that can refer to a singular individual without identifying if that person is male or female—and I think that function can be aptly performed by the pronoun “one.”

Some will argue that there is a precedent for this construction. Apparently, according to Henry Churchyard, Jane Austen’s novels—not to mention the works of Shakespeare, Whitman, Lessing, etc.—are full of examples of the singular “their”: http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html. Such stellar examples would seem to endorse the use of a plural pronoun as a singular one.

However, I would like to point out that some of these examples from Austen appear only during dialogue and thus were written to reflect perhaps not dialect but authentic human speech: informal, flawed, vernacular, and ungrammatical. While 37 out of 87 of Austen’s examples come from the narrator—the rest from the characters themselves—these numbers are the results of, according to Churchyard, “search patterns [which] were basically the morphemes ‘any’, ‘each’, ‘every’, ‘no’, ‘one’, and ‘who(m)’, found preceding ‘their’ or ‘themselves’ within the same orthographic sentence; and the morpheme ‘body’ found preceding any of the ‘they’ words within the same orthographic sentence.” With these limited and skewed parameters, these numbers hardly represents how often Austen’s pronouns agree in number with their antecedents. How many times did Austen avoid the singular “they”? How often did she—or Shakespeare, Whitman, Lessing, etc.—use the singular “they” not with the indefinite pronouns named in the parameters but rather with referential antecedents, nouns that identified with one gender or another?

I care about grammar rules. I teach English, and many of my students use the singular “they.” I mean no offense, but the majority of them do not write like Austen et al. In fact, I doubt they know they are using the singular “they,” much less why they are doing so. I doubt they think, “I have a singular noun as an antecedent, so my pronoun should agree—thank goodness for the singular ‘they’!” Their writing indicates that this construction is Just What People Say.

Furthermore, I agree with George Orwell’s belief that one should sooner break a grammar rule than “say anything outright barbarous.” However, as a high school and college English teacher, I see the singular they employed when my students, as Orwell described it, “either has a meaning and cannot express it, or . . . inadvertently says something else, or . . . is almost indifferent as to whether [the] words mean anything or not.” Thus, I am against the use of the singular “they” because, as my examples below will show, the majority of the writers who use this construction are not avoiding saying something barbarous—rather, their use of this construction ensures incomprehensibility.

Example #1: “The child talks to the lamb about their creator it is further proof of his innocent mentality that has not yet been corrupted by outside experience.”
In this sentence about William Blake’s “The Lamb,” the subject “child” is singular, and the writer follows it with a singular “their” when he adds the phrase “their creator.” A proponent of the singular “they” might defend this sentence—after all, the child could be either male or female; if one accepts the interpretation that the lamb symbolizes Christ, clearly He offers salvation to both men and women alike. However, this singular “they” is immediately followed by a singular “his” in the masculine “his innocent mentality.” If a case is to be made for the singular “their,” then why does this writer follow it with the inconsistent singular “his”? Why not “her”? If the writer is conscientious about avoiding gender, then why is “child” an antecedent for both “their” and “his”? Clearly this writer does not know or care whether he uses the pronoun “his” or “their” or whether he writes an incomprehensible sentence.

Example #2: “Animal planet does a magnificent job organizing their website so that it’s very easy to access information.” Again, the subject—“Animal [P]lanet”—is singular, and the writer follows it with a singular “their” in the phrase “their website.” However, “Animal Planet” is a web site. As far as I know, websites are not identified with any gender, so there’s no reason why the gender-neutral pronoun “its”—as in “its website”—cannot be used instead of the singular “they.” Does “their” refer to executives in charge of Animal Planet? I would guess that there is a parent company that owns Animal Planet, so does “their” refer to the executives at that company? Who exactly is the writer implying owns this website? Who exactly is this sentence about? I would guess that the writer has no idea who owns Animal Planet, so again, her use of “their” attempts to cover up this ignorance.

Example #3: “Studies show that when a company pays their workers more, they make up for that lost money in low turnover rates and increased productivity.” “[A] company” is singular, and the writer follows it with a singular “their”—just as we saw in the last example, where “their” was used to refer to the singular Animal Planet. However, the writer of this sentence further complicates things with the use of the word “they”; is this a singular “they” referring to the company, or is it a plural “they” referring to the workers? Exactly who makes up “for that lost money in low turnover rates and increased productivity”? While the workers themselves can generate low turnover rates and increased productivity, after examining the sentence, I think the writer means that it’s the company that makes up for the money spent on workers’ increased wages. This sentence is not the most difficult sentence in the world to parse, but wouldn’t its meaning be much clearer if it straightforwardly read, “When a company pays workers more, it makes up that lost money”? Why not simply use the gender neutral “its” to refer to the company?

Example #4: “American Eagle Outfitters, or AEO for short, is an American clothing and accessories store. They have more than nine-hundred store locations.” Again, a corporation is a gender-neutral “it.” There is no need for the singular “they.” I asked this student, “Who is ‘they’ in this sentence?” and she replied, “I don’t know. The company?” If the writer does not know why she is choosing her words in a sentence, how is the reader supposed to understand them?

Example #5: “I agree with The Red Phoenix when they say that ‘Telling these stories is essential to raising consciousness of how capitalism crushes people, drains them of their energies, extracts surplus value from their toils and leaves them with barely enough to survive.’” The Red Phoenix is a newspaper. Who is this “they”? Is it the same as the “them’s” and the “their” in the quote? I would guess that the “they” means “whoever wrote this article I’m quoting” and the “them’s” and “their” refer to “people crushed by capitalism.” However, the writer never bothers to distinguish between them. Fans of the singular “they” will cite Austen’s use of it to refer to indefinite pronouns, as in “Everyone should always do their best,” where “everyone” could refer to every human being ever. The pronouns in example #5, however, have antecedents as they refer to specific groups of people: the writers of the article in The Red Phoenix and those people crushed by capitalism. While this overuse of “they” to mean “some generic group of people I’m not naming” might be an altogether separate issue, but it is related to the problem with the singular “they”: both lack precision and comprehensibility. Using “they” to refer to an indefinite group or person with an unknown gender is one thing; using “they” to refer to a specific group or a specific person whom the writer is too lazy to name is another. Which is better: “I agree with ‘Politics and the English Language’ when he says we should not say ‘anything barbarous’” or “I agree with ‘Politics and the English Language’ when they say we should not say ‘anything barbarous’”? Personally, I think it’s better to say, “I agree with George Orwell when he says we should not say ‘anything barbarous,’” but I have seen students use the singular “they” in such cases, i.e., to refer to antecedents that are clearly singular and identify as either male or female.

Example #6: “Unfortunately, the reality is, students are not purely students. They are also parents, spouses, workers, etc. It is unrealistic to assume that a student’s studies is their most important priority. Most students work while also tackling coursework.” In three of the four sentences, the subject is plural: “students,” “They,” and “students.” However, the one exception uses the singular version of “student”—the possessive “student’s”—but then follows it with a singular “their.” Why not just keep it plural? Again, when plural pronouns are singular, and students are unwilling to read what they write, precision and comprehensibility are jeopardized.

Example #7: “In David K. Shipler’s novel, The Working Poor, he tells a series of stories with countless unfortunate events describing the struggle that lower class workers face when trying to obtain a job. Every day, struggling mothers and fathers go without a job. Every day, they become a little more in debt. But the real question is whether or not they are actually trying to find a job. They should be going on interviews and speaking with employers.” “Workers,” “mothers,” “fathers”—all plural. “They”—also plural. But who is this “they” who should be “actually trying to find a job”? They seem to be the subject of The Working Poor, a book about people who, as the title implies, already have jobs. So why is the writer encouraging them to go on interviews and find a job? I would guess it’s easy to say what “they” need to do when you don’t actually have to know who or what you’re talking about. When the word “they” is abused and forced to not only operate without a logical antecedent but also refer to someone or something singular, it loses meaning—and, thus, “they” is then used to refer to things that or people who may or may not exist. In David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Ricky Roma says, “They say that it was so hot in the city today, grown men were walking up to cops on street corners begging them to shoot them.” Earlier, he tells a potential customer, “You know, they say you don’t buy it, you rent it. The thing. You really, I mean, what do you keep?” Exactly who does Roma mean he says “they say”? He means no one in particular, of course—the expression “they say,” in common conversation, is simple shorthand for “I heard this from someone, who I don’t remember—but who said it is not important.” When my co-worker told me, “They said we’re supposed to get 18 inches of snow tomorrow,” who is this “they”? Again, one is not supposed to ask; this generic “they” is informal, flawed, vernacular, and ungrammatical, but who cares if the identity of “they” doesn’t matter?

Unfortunately, many writers apply this conversational use of “they” to their formal writing, to situations where the identity of “they” does matter. “They should be going on interviews and speaking with employers.” Who should be going on interviews? The working poor? The unemployed? Does the reader know? Does the writer? Is it likely that writers who misuse “they” this way don’t even know what they’re talking about? This fallacious use of “they” as its subject appears to reference an authority, but in reality there isn’t one. There isn’t even a clear antecedent.

Thus, while I am against sexist language, I do not see the singular “they” as a solution. The “he/she” construction can be unwieldy, so several acclaimed authors, in order to escape this awkward gender trap, have used “they” when the antecedent was a single indefinite pronoun. However, many writers today use “they” when this gender trap is not present—for example, when the antecedent is a journalist who identifies with one gender, or when the antecedent is a company or a website that should take the pronoun non-gendered “it.” Simply put, many writers today use “they” because it is easy and requires no thought or attention to what they are writing. And I believe that thought is important to writing. I agree with Orwell when he says the English language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Thankfully, as Orwell also said, “the process is reversible.” Thus, writers need to reverse this process and use “they” to refer to more than one person or thing and not as a singular pronoun.