ALT TEXT:
- Panel 1: A person with the text “Singular ‘they’” written on them smiling with open arms.
- Panel 2: “Singular ‘They’” beaten up by others who said, “Singular they is ungrammatical. It’s too confusing,” “How can anyone use plural pronouns for singular,” and “Every pronoun should only have one purpose.”
- Panel 3: “You” hiding from the mob who was beating “Singular ‘They’”
- Panel 4: “German ‘Sie’” hiding with even more fear next to “You”
I hate English, it’s also the only language I’m fluent in, so it’s a love/hate relationship.
The disconnect that most people mistake here is between direct and indirect pronouns. Until recently, they/them has been used indirectly, to refer to someone who isn’t present. To use it while they’re present is uncomfortable for many not because it’s supposed to be plural, but because it’s supposed to be indirect. The only time you would (previously) say they/them in the presence of the individual in question, is to disregard them. An effort to make them irrelevant, like, I care so little about you that I’m not even going to recognise your presence.
They/them is very common as a singular pronoun. There’s a ton of good examples of it being used in this way in this thread.
The thing I love/hate about English is that it adapts to how people use it, and right now, we’re adapting they/them to be direct singular, instead of exclusively indirect singular. Unfortunately everyone knows this on some level, and while many are crying about it being plural (not understanding why it makes them uncomfortable), while it’s definitely not, it is indirect, and the non-binary folks have asked us to use it as a direct singular for them (which I support).
IMO, this is a change that can, and by all means, should happen.
The hate of English for me is when perfectly good under-used terms have their definition applied to more commonly (albeit incorrectly) used words, a prime example of this is jealous. Historically it has meant: fiercely protective or vigilant of one’s rights or possessions. Which, when applied to a relationship, results in the other definition for jealousy: feeling or showing suspicion of someone’s unfaithfulness in a relationship. However, people have used jealous under it’s newest definition for a while now, which is: feeling or showing envy of someone or their achievements and advantages. Which as the definition clearly shows, it’s simply a showing of envy, or the act of being envious. The problem I have is that this legitimizes the incorrect use of the word, when we have another word that already means that… Envious. One word co-opting the definition of another is simply a demonstration of the lazy nature of English speakers. We would rather redefine the commonly, and incorrectly used term than learn and use the correct one.
When it comes to they/them, there is no direct singular ungendered term for an individual besides “you”, which will always refer to the person being spoken to. So a new term, or a new definition of an existing term is required. Non-binary people seem to have unanimously agreed that the terms that they want to adapt for this purpose is they and them. I’m fully in support of this, and while it may be uncomfortable for people to adapt to this new usage, it’s something that should be done, and IMO, will be done.
Alternatively, we could co-opt a new word, either entirely unique, or derived from another language, for the direct singular ungendered person. This would probably be more comfortable for the more cis-normative population, but bluntly, getting all of the non-binary people, or at least the majority of them, to agree to the use of the new word, whatever it is, would be challenging at the very least, and it may, in a worst case, be rather insulting to those who prefer they/them, who wouldn’t want to change that just to appease some gendered people who are uncomfortable with they/them. It’s a valid option, but not one that I believe is viable.
On top of that, these are the pronouns they have chosen. As a matter of respect for your fellow humans, we should let the non-binary people choose the words that they would like to use for their pronouns. Something which they have already done, and those terms are they/them. If we, as a species, have any respect for eachother at all, we’ll respect that decision, and adapt, regardless of the temporary discomfort we may have about it in the interim.
People have been crying about language change in all languages since the dawn of speaking. You can look back to relatively recently with the Romans, they’d always complain about non-standard dialectal and colloquial speech and how the youth are ruining our language, or people from X geographical area are butchering Latin rather than using the standard dialect (Classical Latin).
It’s no different today. People (upon political/cultural motivation) complain about using “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, saying it’s confusing (even though we’ve used it as a singular pronoun for those of unknown gender since “they” was borrowed into English), but don’t bat an eye at “you” which was first a plural only (as opposed to singular “thou”) and then gradually shifted to a formal singular pronoun, then to just the only second person pronoun for both numbers. People also complain about pronunciations of words like nuclear, asks, comfortable, etc.
The myth of mispronunciation is a plague upon human language.
It’s not change itself that I hate, it’s when the change makes language less useful. Example, “literally” meaning its opposite, “figuratively,” through common misuse. “It was literally the million-dollar question” used to mean that it was a question that, if answered, would actually be worth a million dollars rather than figuratively meaning it was an important one to answer. Now it’s unclear.
Literally (ha) all linguists would disagree with you there. The word “literally” here has gone through the same evolution that EVERY WORD GOES THROUGH. EVERY WORD YOU SPEAK went through the same thing where you would call it “less clear” or “useless” or whatever.
Language is always unclear. You do not have the same perception of words as someone else does. If we arbitrarily assigned some word uses as “useless” based on someone’s personal idea of what’s useful, we wouldn’t have language. A lot of people would call articles useless (words like “the” or “a/an”), a lot of people would call pronouns useless (I/you/they/etc.), a lot of people would call marked tense useless (no more past tense or future tense!). A lot of languages don’t have these features. English speakers might think grammatical case is useless. Why do you get to decide what’s useless or not? Why is using “literally” as something for emphasis useless to you, and why do you think it’s so objective that you should have the authority to remove that from the language?
Care to give examples?
Of languages that don’t have articles? Russian, Japanese, pretty sure Arabic, a majority of synthetic languages have no articles.
Japanese has no pronouns depending on what you consider a pronoun, pro-drop languages like Spanish or Italian don’t use subject pronouns except for emphasis.
Chinese languages have no tense. Burmese, Malay, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese have no tense. Pirahã has only future tense. Japanese only has 2 tenses, one is past and one is combined present and future.
Pirahã is also debated to have no number system and no names for colors.
There’s plenty of features that people who speak a language think is necessary that plenty of other languages just don’t have. Languages are extraordinarily different and fluid. Word meanings shifting over time, in the case of “literally” where it starts meaning something very different is one of the most common, and gives you the words like “black” in English (which came from the same word that “white” in other languages like French or Spanish came from).
No, examples of words that mean two opposite things at the same time, since you apparently said that every single word in existence has always been that way. “Bad” comes to mind, though it’s a lot easier to tell from context which meaning it has compared to “literally.”
Another non-english example would be the german word “umfahren” which can mean both driving around or over something, depending on context