- [Voiceover] So you may have been hearing a lot of talk
about this thing called singular they recently
not knowing entirely what it is or whether or not
it's okay to use in a sentence or in formal writing.
Um, it's been in the news a lot lately, you know
we're seeing publications like The Washington Post
and The Economist putting it into their style guides.
It was the American Dialect Society's
Word of the Year in 2015
but like what is it, and is it okay to use?
I know that I got dinged all the time
for using "they" as a singular pronoun
in papers in high school, along with "is,"
I got in a lot of trouble for using "is,"
which would always be circled.
Some teachers of mine just really hated "is."
I get it now, it's kind of weak but
anyway we're not talking about that today,
we're talking about they, singular they.
So they is more commonly known as
the plural third person pronoun in English
so if we say, you know,
Rolando and Phil
go to the park we can switch out
Rolando and Phil and say
they go to the park,
and that's one usage of they but you may
have also seen sentences that look like this.
Like, "When a journalist files a story they should always
"make sure their sources check out,"
or "Anyone will tell you the truth if you
"ask them the right questions,"
and you may have noticed that these sentences
use the word "they" to agree with a singular
antecedent like journalist or anyone.
Now for some of you, you might not have noticed
and for some of you, you might have, your immediate
reaction might have been, oh wait, eh, let me get my red pen
but before you do, in order to explain
the context and the history
around this usage, around singular they,
I would like for a moment to talk about "you."
Not you the person, you the person
are a vast unknowable ocean but I mean you the pronoun
and how weird and transgressive
and transformative it is.
In many languages today there are
second person pronouns for both
singular and plural usage.
In French, for example, we'd say tu for singular you
and vous for plural you.
Tu to one person, vous to many.
There's also a social distinction here
that was once more pronounced,
where you'd say vous to social superiors
and tu to close friends.
Now in those languages the vous form is formal
and the tu form is informal.
You're addressing someone you don't know
very well, you use vous.
You're addressing your best buddy, you use tu.
All of this is to say that English used to have
the same distinction so this kind of
lines up with tu and vous.
Once upon a time the singular second person
subject form was thou, the object form
of the singular was thee.
The plural second person subject form
was ye or ye and the object form was you.
This is where you comes in, all right,
and so we, it's funny because we think
of thee and thou as being more fancy
and formal but really it was the opposite way,
this was the informal
and ye and you was the formal.
Now you may recall from our video on
who versus whom that I said whom
was on its way out of the language.
Its usage is being overtaken by who,
it is now usually permissible to use who as an object,
as in the song Who Do You Love by Bo Diddley.
Well the same thing that's happening to whom
happened to ye.
Over the years its function decreased as "you"
took over, it took on a subject and object role
as well as singular and plural functions
but it was still reserved for the highborn,
it was the polite form of address
used for addressing social superiors.
So even though there's only one king
you would refer to that king as "you"
because apparently he was better than you.
He wasn't, but we'll get to that.
But something marvelous happened in English,
the social distinction between you and thou
fell away and you overtook thou and its
subject form thee so now for both the singular
and the plural, for the informal and the formal,
for the subject and the object, all we have here
is you, you, you and you.
It would be as if I, me and we were all replaced
by us, I cannot emphasize how revolutionary this is!
In English you address a king and a peasant
with the same address, under the language they are equal.
Mind you the existence of a single form
of direct address did not annihilate class
distinctions or prejudice in the English-speaking world
but it is no longer possible to encode
a power relationship in English
in the very specific way it once was.
I cheer this development, I think it's
awfully democratic and affirming
of the principle that all human beings
are worthy of respect, which brings us to "they."
This didn't really used to be a problem
in English composition, people were writing
sentences like, "Everybody has their failing,
"you know, and everybody has a right to do
what they like with their own money,"
which is a Jane Austen quote by the way
from Northanger Abbey.
Austen used this construction, Chaucer
used this construction, Shakespeare used this construction,
C.S. Lewis used this construction, these are the people
that we look to as paragons of correctness
and of style in English literature,
and they used this form without any compunctions.
There is a class of grammarians who thought
it would be a great idea to make English adhere
to Latin grammar rules, which is where
we get silly language superstitions like
the prohibition on ending sentences
with prepositions, making it ungrammatical
to say a sentence like, "He's a guy you can rely on,"
or spreading the spurious rumor
that you couldn't split an English infinitive,
as in, you know, to boldly go.
These are falsehoods and they are confusing
and they are needless, pompous class markers
and defeating them, and making you feel
more comfortable with English is why
I got into this profession in the first place.
Anyway, that group of grammarians, that group
decided that when speaking of a generic person
we should say "he," a hypothetical person in
a sentence was always "he" on the grounds that
according to 16th century grammarian William Lily,
"The masculine gender is more worthy than the feminine,"
so you'd be, you'd get sentences that began
"Any judge worth his salt,"
or "Anyone that would say that is out of his mind,"
which presumably was supposed to refer to anyone.
Now for centuries arguments raged over
whether or not the generic "he" erased
women from consideration and now with
the benefit of hindsight we can say
of course it did!
The generic "he" isn't generic.
When referring to a person whose gender
is unknown or undefined by he or she,
it is elegant to call such a person "they,"
as opposed to the ungainly "he or she"
or she, like s/he,
which on their own look alright
but in context and especially when they're
repeated tend to get a little clunky and distracting.
What happened to the word "you"
is happening to "they," the plural
is expanding into the realm of the singular again.
The language is changing because that's
what languages do, and now this is something
that's already done unconsciously,
you see it in literature, you see it in the Bible,
in formal as well as informal speech.
But formalizing this understanding is what
undergirds the decisions of The Economist
and The Washington Post
to start using singular they formally.
Like if you had to ask me right now,
"David, is singular they grammatical?"
I'd say it's as grammatical as "you"
but yeah, this is some of the context of singular they.
This is where it comes from, this is why
it's used, this is what it's replacing,
it's replacing this generic "he" and this
kind of a clunky "she or he."
You can learn anything, David out.