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  • One of my colleagues and I get into heated debates in the hall about whether or not the

  • pronoun "they" can be singular. I say it can, he vehemently disagrees.

  • [music]

  • What were talking about here is often called the singular generic pronoun question. We

  • have the pronounhefor males, we haveshefor females, we haveitfor

  • inanimate objects, but what do you do when you're referring to a person of unknown or

  • unspecified gender?

  • We could take a sentence like, “A teacher should learn (blank) studentsnames.”

  • Hissuggests the teacher is male. “Hersuggests the teacher is female. “His or

  • herseems a bit cumbersome. So what do we do? In the spoken language what many of

  • us would do, we’d say, “A teacher should learn their studentsnames.” We would

  • usethey.” Now some people will say buttheycannot be singular. Here's my evidence

  • that it can.

  • If I say to you, “I was talking to a friend of mine and they said it's a terrible movie.”

  • Most people, for most people, that sentence would go unremarked. I was talking to “a”

  • friend of mine andtheysaid. I'm clearly talking about one person, but I don’t want

  • you to know whether they're male or female or it doesn't matter. And so I saythey.”

  • What about the argument that it's impossible for a word to be both singular and plural

  • at the same time. Well, I would say we already have evidence in the language that it's very

  • possible. If you take the pronounyou,” you can be singular. Talking to one person,

  • You are very wonderful.” I'm talking to a whole group of people, “You are very

  • wonderful.”

  • And we use the same verbarein standard varieties of English for both one person and

  • many people. “Theyhas done exactly the same thing to take on a singular and plural

  • meaning and it’s actually been doing that for centuries. Jane Austen used singularthey,”

  • Shakespeare used singularthey.” I have found examples going back into the Middle

  • English period of singularthey.”

  • So speakers a long time ago solved the problem of how do you refer to a person of unknown

  • or unspecified gender. It was the eighteenth century when grammarians told us that singular

  • theywas not a good idea, and that we should useheinstead. It was the 1970s

  • with feminism that people said using singularheis sexist we need to do something

  • else, and we were all told to usehe or she.” And many of us use that when we write,

  • but when we speak we tend to usetheyand studies show that the vast majority of

  • the time most of us use singularthey.”

  • So it's a problem that we as speakers have already solved. The interesting question is,

  • at what point will we be told that were allowed to write singulartheydown?

  • And you can watch, it’s becoming more and more common, youll now see singularthey

  • in newspapers and magazines as it slowly creeps its way into more formal writing out of the

  • speech that we use every day.

One of my colleagues and I get into heated debates in the hall about whether or not the

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