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Feel free to check Carolyn Hax’s cogent response to this letter. I am limiting my own labors by using it merely to show how politically correct grammatical rules make you like an illiterate imbecile. In place of gendered pronouns, E. uses the plural “they.” It must have taken some effort to sound this stupid.
It’s all about masking gender, hiding an essential aspect of one’s social being. Note the contortions E. has to perform to hide it’s partner’s gender and to render its partner asocial. Since we do not know E’s gender either, I have chosen “it” as the appropriate pronoun. At least, I can sensibly use singular verb forms.
As for the idiocy surrounding the use of “they” as singular, you will note that E is forced to use plural verb forms, as in “they are,” as opposed to “they is.” And as in, "they want" as opposed to "they wants." The latter would make E sound even more illiterate.
It’s like having bad table manners. If you cannot speak English correctly a lot of people are not going to want to deal with you. Of course, you can retreat to your very own mental ghetto, comprised of folks who have a similarly bad command of English grammar. But that makes you the member of a cult and it makes your bad grammar function like the passwords that get you into the local speakeasy.
Without saying a word about the problem in issue, I reprint the letter, grammatical infelicities and all. If I were not in a good mood I would have scattered (sic) throughout, so you would know that I did not distort it. The truth is, if you cannot get the grammar right, you probably do not know how to think at all. And thus, we would not expect that it will ever be able to deal with its partner's problem.
Here it is:
My partner completed an undergraduate degree but struggled to find a career in that industry. Under pressure from family, they followed and struggled through a career path they hated for two years before deciding to go back to college to complete another undergraduate in something they thought they would prefer as a career path.
Their mental health meant this was a difficult adjustment, and while I'm supporting them through it, they are still questioning if even now this is their right career path.
How can I keep helping them when they don't know what they want to do?
— E.
6 comments:
"How can I keep helping them when they don't know what they want to do?" You can't. Take off your grammar hat, put it down, and back away...no, turn around and run away as FAST as you can! This is beyond your capability.
Pot meet kettle or something about glass houses: "render it’s partner asocial." "It's" is the contraction for "it is" and not the possessive form, which is always and ever "its."
Sorry, but you're mistaken here, though if it's any comfort, so is E.
There's nothing particularly wrong with "singular they" per se; it's been in English for quite a few centuries now. Where this "E." person you mention has clearly gone astray is in attempting to push singular they as a specific "gender-neutral" singular pronoun. That's a bound well beyond its normal usage, which has always been limited to standing in for sex-irrelevant terms like "anybody", "everyone", "a doctor" or "a person" (e.g., "Has everybody finished their lunch?" or "A good doctor will always give their patients the best medical advice").
A small group of ideologues - I have no doubt they include E. - is trying to push the use of they from the general to the specific (shamefully, they include persons claiming to be "linguists").
However, in the English-speaking population as a whole, I am just not hearing its use at all. So far, it is not "catching on" - except amongst a particular group of "usual suspects".
JJM
Speaking of mistaken: the sentence, "a good doctor will always give their patients the best medical advice" is a mistake. Normal usage would use the generic "he" or, if the doctor is designated as female, obviously, she. True enough, some people use they after everyone and anyone and person... but these terms are normally singular and normally take the generic masculine pronoun.... as in: everyone and his mother. It's singular because one is singular. Lots of people today say: I seen... but that does not make it correct. It makes it a sign of social class or an affectation. Choose between I saw and I have seen.
"[T]he sentence, 'a good doctor will always give their patients the best medical advice' is a mistake. Normal usage would use the generic "he" or, if the doctor is designated as female, obviously, she."
No and no. There's nothing wrong with the use of "their" in this sentence. As to "a good doctor", it's not a specific doctor of a known sex, it's a statement about doctors in general, thus "their" works quite nicely, thanks.
Millions and millions of English-speakers (of all "social classes") use singular they this way (including me). I would suggest to you that far more us do than don't, so you lose the argument on that basis alone.
The same is not so true for "I saw" versus "I seen". However, it would only take a good majority of English-speakers to use "seen" as a past tense rather than just a past participle to make the usage more acceptable.
JJM
comprised of folks who have a similarly bad command of English
Comprising folks who have ...
At least in the original Latin.
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