Michael Eriksson
A Swede in Germany
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Artificial introduction of “they”

Introduction

I have repeatedly written about the use and, particularly, abuse of “they”, e.g. in [1] and some texts that backlink there.

A particular issue is that many uses of “they” seem to have been artificially introduced or introduced in a very incompetent manner, in that they replace perfectly good standard formulations without “they” that already were “gender neutral” or otherwise beyond reasonable reproach even by those who consider “gender neutrality” something worth the effort (I am emphatically not among them). These uses harm the language without even an imaginary benefit.

Hand in hand, my subjective impression is that formulations that, in some sense, have a slot that can be abused for “they” are disproportionately commonly used relative those that do not, both in absolute terms and in comparison with the past. (Contrast e.g. “someone on their way to X” with “someone headed to X”, “someone going to X”, or, even, “someone X-bound”. The last might be disputed for other reasons, but remains a lesser evil than a contorted “they”.) Whether this is a matter of poverty of formulation in the user (in combination with an abuse of “they”) or a deliberate attempt to create and use such slots, is rarely possible to tell. However, the result is the same in both cases—poverty and a spurious “they”.

While I try to apply Hanlon’s Razor, the frequency of such abuses is such that I cannot suppress the suspicion of a deliberate pushing of “they” for some purpose other than “gender neutrality”. What that purpose would be is a matter of speculation, but an extermination of all other second-person pronouns to further some ideological or political goal, e.g. of anti-individualism, is a possibility.

I stress that such deliberate pushing, if present, need not be present among all, a majority, or even a large plurality of users. More likely, as with so many other Leftist issues, it is a matter of a comparatively small group of manipulators and a much larger group of useful idiots, which might, even, include innocent imitators. (Note that language learning is largely imitative and that even those who already know a language can be strongly and unconsciously affected by what they read/hear from others.)

Terminology and disclaimers

It is understood that what is said about “they” applies similarly to “their”, “theirs”, whatnot, when relevant—and vice versa. Ditto, other pronouns.

As I do not live in an English-speaking country, my exposure to some types of sources/settings/scenarios/whatnot is mostly from works of fiction, e.g. TV series. Real-life versions can differ, especially, as the woke mind-poison seems more common among fiction creators than in the population at large. (And might differ from group to group, e.g. based on age, level of indoctrination, or country-specific version of English.) Most non-fiction encounters come from sources like writings on the Internet and comparatively recent books. (Even in books just a few decades old, the situation was far better.)

Examples given are representative and not actual quotes. (Indeed, some real-life examples are so silly or illogical that I have problems remembering them, just like “to be or not to be” is easier to remember than “at ex to apple be”.)

There is a considerable overlap with other texts, as certain types of examples and ideas naturally re-occur. A key point of this text, unlike others, is to stress the artificialness of “they” in so many uses.

Note that I have no objections to “they” when used correctly—as demonstrated by repeated own uses in this text.

I note here that “he”, not “they”, is the correct pronoun for the generic second person singular, and will not address this again in the continuation. See older texts for more on this and some cases where e.g. “she” might be preferable.

Examples

(In addition to those already given.)

  1. The ever more common use of “they” to imply or replace any singular pronoun, including cases where the perfectly “gender neutral” use of “it” has a long history, avoids a confusion of numbers, and reduces the risk of mistaken references.

    This in several variations (with some overlap):

    Firstly, the use of “they” when a singular “it” is already established, as with animals that have not been awarded a “he” or “she”.

    Secondly, replacing standard phrases using “it” with formulations using “they”. For instance, if someone is interested in who had just called, the typical, traditional, and perfectly “gender neutral” question is “Who was it?” (to boot, with some good backups, e.g. “Who was that?” and “Who called?”). Today, the idiocy of “Who were they?” seems as or more likely. I would be unsurprised to see “They are raining.” replace “It is raining.” within my lifetime.

    Thirdly, a blanket use of “they” for any and all individual persons—even those who do not have “preferred pronouns” to that effect and even those whose sex and “gender” are known to all involved parties.

    Fourthly, the use of “they” for a singular of a collective nature (for which “it” is almost always correct and preferable), as with companies, bands, teams, government agencies, whatnot, which are ever and ever again referred to as “they”—and even in contexts where it simply does not make sense or might be an outright source of confusion. Take a hypothetical “The FBI had a shoot-out with the bank robbers and they won.”. Assuming that “they” can refer to the FBI, who won? The FBI or the bank robbers? This is the more annoying as a very simple re-write would make “they” grammatically acceptable and increase the precision of language. Above, simply replacing “FBI” with “FBI agents” would remove the grammar issue (but not the ambiguity) and give an account that is closer to the truth.


    Side-note:

    Here, it can be argued that sloppiness in language, a failure to be aware of ambiguities, whatnot, is a greater issue than abuse of “they”; however, the abuse increases the risk, both through creating more potential cases and through, in my impression, weakening the ability of learners to think correctly in terms of numbers, pronouns, concordance with verbs, and similar.



    Side-note:

    Someone could conceivably argue for “FBI” as a short-hand for “FBI agents”; however, this fails on too many cases where this does not make sense or would cause even worse ambiguities—especially, as “FBI” must be allowed to exist as a reference to the FBI as a whole or in a more abstract sense. How e.g. would a sentence like “Two FBI agents shot two other FBI agents and were fired by the FBI.” be handled?

    More generally, in the opposite direction, and for off-topic reasons, I recommend restraint when using formulations that imply that e.g. an organization performs actions, let alone holds opinions or values. It is, for instance, better to say that a press-speaker or an FBI director made a certain claim than that the FBI did so. (Assuming truthfulness, of course.) Likewise, chances are that an individual agent does not speak for the agency as a whole, and for someone who has spoken to an FBI agent to claim that “the FBI told me” could be extremely misleading.


    Fifthly, the replacement of various other pronouns. The above “backup” of “Who was that?” is one example of “that” being replaced; a better example is e.g. “Who might that be?” before the call is taken, where many today would use the idiocy of “Who might they be?”. Ditto e.g. the complete absurdity of replacing “That might be John.” with “They might be John.”. (I opt for “various other pronouns”, because I overlooked “that” during my original writing and do not know what other cases I might have overlooked even now.)

  2. Using odd and more complicated formulations that seem to have no other purpose than to force or enable a “they”. Take a question like “Did you meet the winner?”. Well, why go with something that obvious, when you can use “The winner, did you meet them?”. Similarly, contrast “I met an old high-school friend.” with “I met an old friend. I went to high-school with them.”.

    These cases often go back to a failure to build natural phrases and might, partially, instead be explained by a naive writer’s wish to artificially minimize sentence length or complexity, in combination with incompetent pronoun use. The “I met [...]” above is a semi-strong example. A stronger example is “I have a friend who runs a store.” vs. “I have a friend. They run a store.”, which could be an artificial pushing of “they” or could be rooted in the belief that the typical adult reader cannot handle sentences more complex than “See Spot run.”. (However, even this more innocuous explanation only works when “they” is abused to identify someone of known sex, who by rights should be a “he” or a “she”.)


    Side-note:

    Such chopping of sentences makes matters harder, not easier, for an even remotely typical reader, as the overall thought is just as long and complex and the support from a strong sentence is removed. This, especially, when the result is ungrammatical in the manner of many journalists, whose punctuation could stem from a game of pin-the-donkey: “I have a friend. Who runs a store. In New York. Next to a subway station.”

    (Should I err in the other direction, do not jump to the conclusion that we should throw out the baby with the bathwater.)


  3. Pushing combinations of “everyone” (“every”, “anyone”, and similar words) and “they”. Consider a school teacher speaking to a class and a “Does everyone have their books?”. Apart from the disputable use of “their” (grammatical plural) with “everyone” (grammatical singular), the entire formulation is awkward and misleading: The teacher is speaking to the class and should, then, use the second person to begin with—not the third person. This the more so, as the second person does not have any “gender” issues. Try “Do you all have your books?” instead. At worst, a formulation like “Do all students have their books?” and “Everyone, do you have your books?” (where, unlike elsewhere, “[e]veryone” serves to call attention and to address the class in the manner of a vocative) would correct the grammatical problem while still allowing any deliberate effect that the teacher might have sought by using the third person. Ditto, when the first person should be used, because the speaker is included in the group: Why use formulations with “everyone” and “they” when “we” is available, avoids the abuse of “they” and any singular/plural confusion, and reflects the actual situation so much better? (Consider a lost team competition and “We all did our best.” vs. “Everyone did their best.” when spoken by a team member.)

    Generally, many problems can be resolved by a reformulation using “all” or some other plural quantifier (e.g. “some”, “many”)—and the odd over-use of “every” and “everyone” where “all” is more natural is a potentially strong sign of agenda pushing. Consider “All parents worry about their children.” vs. “Every parent worries about their children.” and “Everyone worries about their children.”. (Phrasings involving parents have been absurdly common, but this might be a result of common topics in fiction.)


    Side-note:

    This is the worse when another singular aspect is pushed, which considerably increases the possibility that the speaker has not just failed to acknowledge the difference between grammatical and “logical” number (“everyone” is singular but is applied to a plural in a manner that makes a mistake in good faith comparatively likely). For instance, if we have one book per student, someone might push “Does everyone have their book?”, which makes clear that “their” is abused as a singular. Even with one book per student, “books” would have been the lesser evil. Likewise, the above examples involving “parent” are, probably, more commonly found using “child”, as with “Every parent worries about their child.”, which makes the formulation doubly unfortunate. (Triply, if we count the risk that some child in a multi-child family will feel excluded and neglected.)

    In a bigger picture, even legitimate combinations of plurals and singulars are tricky, and more explicit formulations are usually better. For instance, “Does everyone have their respective book[s]?”, would be more precise as to whether a collective ownership is present and could be argued to remove the problem present with “Does everyone have their book?”.

    (For an example of problems with ownership and other connections, take the above scenario with FBI agents vs. bank robbers and consider the claim “The FBI agents fired their guns at their enemies.”, where the various agents most likely had their own respective gun or guns, even if ultimately owned by the FBI as an entity, but where the enemies presumably were shared. Even a singular gun could underlie common ownership, as with “The artillerists fired their gun at their enemies.” when a group of artillerists working with a single gun/canon was intended. Here, cf. below, we also see that “the” is often a choice to consider over “their” even when “their” is used correctly.)


  4. Pushing of singular + “they”, when plural + “they” would have worked as well or better, even the abuse of “they” aside. In addition to the “everyone” above, consider “The student must be on their best behavior.” vs. “The students [...]” or “An Olympic athlete hopes to be in the best shape of their life.” vs. “Olympic athletes [...]” or “All Olympic athletes [...]”. (With trivial adaptions to the bracketed parts where needed.)

    A particularly common variation might be poor combinations with words like “average” or other group characteristics. Instead of resorting to ugliness like “The average worker will have less left of their paycheck.” one could simply say “Workers will, on average, have less left of their paychecks.”. Ditto, many combinations with words like “usual”, “typical”, whatnot. Consider modifications of the previous example to use “The typical worker will have [...]” vs. e.g. “Typical workers will have [...]”.

  5. Pushing of “one” in an absurd combination with “they” as with “one must do their best” over “one must do one’s best”. (Possibly, because an older convention might have used “he”, as with “one must do his best”, but this would “solve” a “problem” that no longer existed and agenda pushing seems a more likely explanation.)

  6. A borderline case is many uses of “their” when “the” would have worked just as well, ducked the entire issue, and, as a bonus, saved two letters. Consider “The visitor found the[ir] way.”, which almost always will be better with the shorter version, even aside from the grammatically nonsensical use of “their”. Similar claims can apply to some other words, e.g. “a” and “that” (but are less “in the face” through not being a prefix of “their”), as with “The guest lent me a book.” over “The guest lent me their book.”, where we also see a potential improvement as the latter version implies that the guest only had one book, which could be wrong. (A slight gain from the implication of ownership, in that the guest did not lend someone else’s book can be argued, but is unlikely in this case. If in doubt, the speaker is unlikely to know whether ownership applied and/or is justified in assuming it.)

Potentially off-topic, I also note that some users (especially, on Wikipedia) seem to deliberately use phrases that juxtapose a natural singular with “they” in a flagrant manner, e.g. by speaking of an “individual” and two words later reference that individual with “they”—something so contrary to the nature of an individual that the user might just as well scratch a blackboard. As noted, I try to apply Hanlon’s Razor, but current abuses could make Hanlon’s Razor tantamount to burying one’s head in the sand.

Another interesting-but-potentially-off-topic issue is the use of “they” in a manner that is correct, but where other words (e.g. “those”/“these”) or completely different formulations would have been as good or better. (“[These/They] are not the droids that you are looking for.”) This could be an extended case of agenda pushing, by making “they” the go-to word for almost anything, which could reduce the resistance against abuse as a singular; however, it could also be a lack of imagination in formulation or some other language weakness. Because the immediate issue of abuse-as-a-singular is missing, the chance of weak use in good faith seems greater than for most of the above.

Excursion on image texts

A particularly common, and particularly absurd, source of examples are various image texts (notably, the “alt” texts used for HTML; however, other types, including regular legends, are sometimes afflicted), where some absurd standard of gender-neutrality contrary to the purpose of such texts is sought—and sought in an incompetent manner.

In as far as these texts describe the image contents (note, again, “alt” texts), they should be sufficiently detailed that they can give someone without images activated, who is blind and relies on a screen reader, or otherwise draws on such texts, a fair idea of these contents. However, the poor reader might instead encounter idiocies like “person on their computer”. (An actual example that I recently saw on the “Fox News” website—a place that should know better than to cater to Leftist language distortion.)

Looking more in detail at this example:

Firstly, it fails to be sufficiently descriptive. While what exact information to include can be a matter of both taste and circumstance, the above is clearly insufficient. At a minimum, a division by both sex and some rough age group would be needed, e.g. that the “person” actually was an “adult male”, a “female teen”, or a “male child”. This automatically takes care of “their”, which now, by any sane writer, would be replaced with “his” or “her”. Likewise, “computer” is sufficiently wide a term that at least a specification to “desktop“/”laptop” is needed.


Side-note:

To illustrate the importance of circumstance, note that an article about a newly released computer model might wish to stress that the computer depicted is of that model, while an article about a certain person might stress that this particular person is depicted. Another article yet might wish to state the setting of the image or point out that the computer is a vintage Atari. Etc.

Taste, in turn, can differ not just in what contents are considered relevant but on whether completeness or brevity is more important.


Secondly, and contrariwise, if the trivial information given had been enough, this comes close to proof that the entire image was pointless and should not have been included, making the choice to include it an equally pointless opening for a language problem. (And, off topic, a cause of other problems like waste of screen space, waste of bandwidth, and waste of the reader’s time.)

Thirdly, the above assumes that a pronoun is needed at all, while a more natural formulation would use “a computer”. It is both shorter and more likely to match the truth, as the “a” is easy to establish while the “their”/“his”/“her” is very often speculation.

Fourthly, the use of “their” (as so often is the case) introduces a mistake (or, on the outside, ambiguity) in reference, as the most natural interpretation is that the computer belongs to some group of more than one, e.g. the parents of a child, should a child be the user.