My boomer parents will die on the hill that it sounds “wrong” to use “they” to refer to a singular entity. And whenever they bring that up, I always remind them that the word “they” has been used in that way for AGES.
Example: “Whose umbrella is this? Did they already leave?”
Watched a video that addressed this in good faith, because it is a tad awkward. They brought up and old term (because this isn’t new), “thone”, short for “the one”. And I’mma be real with you, “THE ONE, DIRK MCCALLAHAN” does ring kinda hard.
Most people arguing about this are coming from an emotional place, so facts and truths don’t really matter. If gender in language is important to your in-group, that’s what matters. Not the history of language. Not the dictionary. The group believes this. If you reject your group, you’ll die alone. Or that’s what the brain would have you believe. We’re all a little susceptible to social influence on belief. Some people are just unwilling or unable to overcome it.
What’s craziest to me is that people so often adopt beliefs as to belong to some sort of in group, right, but won’t necessarily adopt the set of beliefs that actually immediately benefits them, ingratiates them to their immediate surrounding environment, gives them a more functional outlook. No, it’s way simpler, people just adopt the beliefs of what they perceive in their immediate surroundings. Oftentimes this manifests more as people locking themselves into increasingly insular media environments, rather than, say, having productive conversations with their kids, or allowing themselves to be convinced by their friends, or being able to even really talk on a surface level with their co-workers. Their immediate environment, their “in-group”, can supercede physical reality.
When my brain interpreted ‘they’ singular to refer to a unspecified so-far unnamed person or an already mentioned group, it was definitely confusing to have it suddenly used to refer to someone who had just been referred to by name. This was definitely a novel use of ‘they’ for me at the time and I don’t understand why no-one else ever seems to have this kind of confusion. I did get used to it but I don’t think it’s as universal as some of y’all realise.
Edit: I just learnt the term ‘indeterminate antecedent’ from the Wikipedia article someone else linked. Thanks to them, I just got a little bit smarter. ;-)
My boomer parents will die on the hill that it sounds “wrong” to use “they” to refer to a singular entity. And whenever they bring that up, I always remind them that the word “they” has been used in that way for AGES.
Example: “Whose umbrella is this? Did they already leave?”
It doesn’t seem to make a difference.
Watched a video that addressed this in good faith, because it is a tad awkward. They brought up and old term (because this isn’t new), “thone”, short for “the one”. And I’mma be real with you, “THE ONE, DIRK MCCALLAHAN” does ring kinda hard.
Most people arguing about this are coming from an emotional place, so facts and truths don’t really matter. If gender in language is important to your in-group, that’s what matters. Not the history of language. Not the dictionary. The group believes this. If you reject your group, you’ll die alone. Or that’s what the brain would have you believe. We’re all a little susceptible to social influence on belief. Some people are just unwilling or unable to overcome it.
Belief is social.
For many people, emotion is the only truth.
What’s craziest to me is that people so often adopt beliefs as to belong to some sort of in group, right, but won’t necessarily adopt the set of beliefs that actually immediately benefits them, ingratiates them to their immediate surrounding environment, gives them a more functional outlook. No, it’s way simpler, people just adopt the beliefs of what they perceive in their immediate surroundings. Oftentimes this manifests more as people locking themselves into increasingly insular media environments, rather than, say, having productive conversations with their kids, or allowing themselves to be convinced by their friends, or being able to even really talk on a surface level with their co-workers. Their immediate environment, their “in-group”, can supercede physical reality.
When my brain interpreted ‘they’ singular to refer to a unspecified so-far unnamed person or an already mentioned group, it was definitely confusing to have it suddenly used to refer to someone who had just been referred to by name. This was definitely a novel use of ‘they’ for me at the time and I don’t understand why no-one else ever seems to have this kind of confusion. I did get used to it but I don’t think it’s as universal as some of y’all realise.
Edit: I just learnt the term ‘indeterminate antecedent’ from the Wikipedia article someone else linked. Thanks to them, I just got a little bit smarter. ;-)