{"id":33814,"date":"2023-08-15T13:06:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-15T20:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=33814"},"modified":"2025-04-04T10:18:37","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T17:18:37","slug":"the-singular-they-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=33814","title":{"rendered":"The Singular They … Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

My first reaction to this social media post by The Bloggess<\/a><\/strong>: Who are you taking to college, your daughter or her pets?<\/p>\n

Before you jump on me for not blurring names and faces on this screen grab, Jenny Lawson, aka<\/em> The Bloggess, is very much a public figure, a popular author and blogger who’s widely followed on social media. Jenny frequently shares photos of her daughter Hailey, of whom she’s justly proud.<\/p>\n

Now, I get why some of us use the singular they as a pronoun, and why the rest of us should try our best to respect that choice. But here’s a case where there’s both a singular and a plural they in a single photo: Hailey, whose chosen pronouns are they\/them; and the babies, her pets.<\/p>\n

You see a photo of a single person and two pets. The caption to the photo references “their” and “them.” Your mind locks on the pets, because 99% of the time their and them are plural pronouns, and the pets are the only plural in the photo. (But wait, aren’t animals “its”? Nope. Pets are different. In English, pets get pronouns, so two or more of ’em are a they.)<\/p>\n

Yeah, I hear you. It only takes a second to figure out what Hailey’s mom really means. But we shouldn’t have to figure it out. One’s meaning should be clear to listeners and readers. What if the photo showed Hailey with two of her (human) friends, and the caption still read “Hailey saying goodbye to their friends before we get in the car to take them to college”? We’d probably assume Hailey and her mom are taking Hailey’s friends to college, and isn’t that nice of them?<\/p>\n

I think in the future we\u2019ll look back on this era of pronoun experimentation with embarrassment. You can tell me all day long how Chaucer and Shakespeare used the singular they, and maybe they did once or twice, but we all grew up with a clear understanding of singular and plural pronouns, and if Chaucer and Shakespeare were so damn hot on the singular they why did they also use him and her?<\/p>\n

Update 8\/16\/23):<\/span><\/strong><\/em> My last paragraph was unnecessary and mean. I’m coming at pronouns from the perspective of writing, where, at least to me, clarity is everything. There has to be a better way to avoid gendering people who don’t want to be gendered. In casual speech, I might drop the occasional singular they. But not in writing. I’ll find other ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think in the future we’ll look back on this era of pronoun experimentation with embarrassment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,21],"tags":[2988,3773],"class_list":["post-33814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-words","tag-englishassheisspoke","tag-pronouns-2"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33814"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36200,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33814\/revisions\/36200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}