He, she or they?

Reading this article the other day reminded me of one of my biggest bugbears. It’s when people are so afraid of discriminating that they insist on writing the clunky and awkward ‘he or she’ and ‘his or her’ rather than using ‘they’ and ‘their’.

But would you ever say that out loud? ‘I’ll phone the person at the shop, but I’m not sure he or she will have those fluffy giant pandas in stock?’ Or, ‘Everyone should bring his or her homework to class so that he or she can present it.’ No, probably not. So why write it?

Our language is constantly evolving, and with it our impression of what is ‘grammatical’. That's why the singular form of ‘you’ – ‘thou’ – was squeezed out some time ago and replaced by the plural ‘you’ (except for in some parts of Northern England and Scotland where ‘thou’ is still used, but that’s a different blog altogether). So what’s stopping us from using ‘they’ in the singular too?

We won’t be the first. As the Guardian article points out, great writers such as Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll weren’t afraid to use the singular ‘they’. And I found this in Oxford Dictionaries online:

“Some people object to the use of plural pronouns in this type of situation on the grounds that it’s ungrammatical. In fact, the use of plural pronouns to refer back to a singular subject isn’t new: it represents a revival of a practice dating from the 16th century. It’s increasingly common in current English and is now widely accepted both in speech and in writing.”

And with that ends my first sort-of-grammar rant. There will be more, I promise.