This post over at Antick Musings, dealing as it does the use of "they" as "the definite neuter singular third-person pronoun", struck a nerve with me. It’s one of the many, many, grammatical crimes of which I am guilty. I could try to make excuses, but I won’t. My abuse of language is indefensible. Or should that be undefendable? Hmm….
I do envy those people who seem to have an innate sense of grammar. They can spot verb tense disagreements from miles away, while I struggle with simple sentence construction. Really — it’s like a baby trying to program a VCR; the task is eventually accomplished, but not necessarily with the desired results. For those who have mastered it, grammar is rather like a pneumatic tube system, allowing them to transmit their ideas in an orderly, linear fashion with a kind of grace and elegance that’s become quite rare in our modern age. For myself, however, it’s difficult enough to marshal my thoughts into some semblance of reason, never mind language.
The scientific explanation for my problem is that I am a mush-head, of course. And yet, I feel compelled to try to assist the grammarians in fixing language to the ground, lest colloquial usage and slang bury us all.
The fact that "they" has organically emerged as a popular choice for those looking for a simple, gender-neutral pronoun is offensive and should certainly be stopped. First of all, it’s awkward and confusing. Secondly, we know what happens when we let one of these things slip through the cracks; remember what happened with ain’t.
But we can’t go back to the bad old days, when "man", "his", and other masculine words were acceptable stand-ins for mixed groups, or gender indeterminate minor characters. Nor would it necessarily be advisable to invent and promulgate some new, artificial word to serve the purpose — because, frankly, everything everyone’s tried to come up with sounds too ridiculous for anybody to agree to be the first one to use.
Some have proposed she/he or him/her, which is all very fine for written language, but leaves spoken language with a good bit of awkwardness to deal with.
Then, there are those who regularly (perhaps even reflexively) just use the female pronouns to refer to parties whose genders are unknown. By some lights this is more than fair, given how long their masculine counterparts were used in that way, but a case could be made that no, it’s not.
Really, there’s a very simple solution to all of this. We’ve got a non-gendered pronoun already. What is it? It. For example, instead of saying, "Dial the operator and ask him or her to give you an outside line," we could say, "Dial the operator and ask it to give you an outside line."
What? Too cold? Too clinical? Too insensitive?
I find that difficult to believe. We live in cold and unfeeling times, where no waiter’s honest mistake escapes a tirade, where scruples only get in the way of making serious money, and where we’ll all soon be wearing barrels and living under bridges.
Actually, Wall Street is a great place for this usage to start out. Those who have money, but also have to suffer the indignity of working for it, often find themselves under pressure to locate new status symbols, as the hoi polloi get a hold of the old ones. Suddenly adopting the pronoun "it" to refer to their fellow human beings would make them look like assholes, of course — assholes too rich to care about looking like assholes. (Actually, it’s surprising that the working wealthy haven’t already tried this out; then again, it’s likely that they wouldn’t want anyone to get the impression that they value people almost as much as they value objects.)
It’s possible that "it" would filter down to the less well-heeled members of society; in a few generations, it might even lose its sour aftertaste. And, in the end, we’d have a much simpler method of referring people in the 3rd person — and a much more cruel world, probably, but that’s language for you.
