Before I understood its imperfections, English was faultless. I was a happy follower of the prescriptive rules of English grammar who adhered to all the newest trends in grammar and never made an editorial move without consulting publications such as Warriner's English Composition and Grammar or The Chicago Manual of Style. The first twinges of doubt came at the beginning of the 1970s when feminists began to grumble about sexist language. Although I had been vaguely aware that expressions such as "All men are created equal" and "Everyone is entitled to his day in court" didn't apply directly to me, I didn't fault the language or its speakers for these innocent oversights. What surprised me, however, was the choler inspired in otherwise intelligent people when women began to suggest we take another look at our English language, particularly at its systems of nomenclature and pronoun selection.

Also See in TVR: The Absence Note by jjoan ttaber altieri

Traditionalists were unabashed in their sarcasm and condescension, lamenting the growing number of out-of-control women suffering from an infliction they gleefully termed "pronoun envy" (qtd. in Martyrna 483). It took editors at the New York Times a full ten years before they accepted Ms as an honorific; it took about the same amount of time to convince speakers of American English that androcentric words such as "man" and "mankind" could easily be replaced with the more inclusive "humanity" or "humankind." Martyna summarizes the problem in a 1980 article:

Time calls it "Ms-guided," a syndicated columnist "linguistic lunacy." TV Guide wonders what the "women's lib redhots" with "the nutty pronouns" are doing. A clear understanding of the sexist language issue continues to elude the popular press. The medium is not alone in its misunderstanding. (482)

However, feminists and others sensitive to the power of language found support in theories put forward by linguists such as Sapir and Whorf; that is, language plays a role in shaping people's attitudes, even their worldview. American women had started to demand the same freedoms men had long enjoyed, and English would soon feel the burn of the intensifying social revolution. Bate finds that social and linguistic changes cannot be separated and that "interpersonal communication is the primary mediator between large-scale social processes and individual behavior" (148). Ultimately, the lexicon of American English began to change. And while we still hear an occasional "lady fireman" or "male stewardess," most Americans routinely use terms such as firefighter, letter carrier, police officer, flight attendant, even if the mental image inspired by the terms remains gender-specific. It's a start.

"Everyone get back to their seats!" (Fifth-grade teacher to students)

So What's the Problem?

One of the surprise downsides of triumphing in the battle for nonsexist language is the dilemma created by the fact that English doesn't have a "grammatically acceptable" gender-free third-person singular pronoun to reference a person. This doesn't particularly matter in speech because native speakers of English automatically rely on singular they (their, them) as the pronoun of choice; for example:

I don't care what everyone else is doing; they're not me.

If someone calls, tell them I'm out.

But singular they can be problematic in writing, partly because the act of writing makes one reluctant to break prescriptive rules. And, strict grammarians — especially those who control the citadels of formal education and publishing — dictate that the epicene pronoun they reference plural, not singular, antecedents.

In the good old days — between the mid-eighteenth century and the late 1960s; specifically, before women insisted on being included in the human race — writers employed the allegedly generic he to fill the void. In the name of "correct" grammar and without so much as a murmur of rebellion, we embraced the idea that he meant she as well as he and rejected the notion that feminine gender mattered. Thus embracing the ideal of genderless he, we didn't even smile at the absurdity of a sentence such as, "No person shall be forced to have an abortion against his will" or "Man, being a mammal, breast-feeds his young" (qtd. in Meyers 228, 489).

Speakers of English, on the other hand, have been using singular they since the days of Middle English. And writers — even those most glorified in English literature — used the term long before grammarians decided to stuff our brawny English corpus into a tight Latinate corset. Yet, despite valiant and consistent attempts by grammarians to convince speakers of English to accept generic he, singular they continues to thrive in speech. As far back as 1978, Martyna found that though generic he is used more often in writing, singular they is used more often in speech (137).

Meyers notes that in written documents, "generic pronoun choices [he or she and singular they] have failed thus far ... to gain approval" (228). Yet, although her 1989 study indicates that the majority of adult college writers — 47 percent of 392 subjects ranging in age from 22 to 64 — choose generic he, a strong 44 percent prefer singular they. Although she doesn't argue specifically against generic he, she notes that "our encounters with 'he' rarely take place in clearly generic contexts" (488). Instead, generic he appears alongside and in the vicinity of sex-specific he, which renders it ambiguous.

"Everyone's having the time of their lives at Mammamia's." (Advertisement for a NYC restaurant)

Singular They, Trippingly on the Tongue

Beyond the world of linguistics, it isn't generally known that singular they was once accepted usage in English writing and speech. There is no evidence that speakers of Middle English and early Modern English used gender-inclusive he as we know it today (Hook 333). In fact, Bodine claims, "English has always had ... linguistic devices for referring to sex-indefinite referents, notably the use of singular 'they' (their, them)" (168). Examples of such usage can be found on Henry Churchyard's Linguist Page, a website that applauds singular they's long tradition in English literature.

1535 FISHER Ways perf. Relig. ix. Wks. (1876) 383: "He neuer forsaketh any creature vnlesse they before haue forsaken them selues."

1749 FIELDING Tom Jones VIII. Xi: "Every Body fell a laughing, as how could they help it."

1759 CHESTERF. Lett. IV. ccclv. 170: "If a person is born of a gloomy temper ... they cannot help it."

1835 WHEWELL in Life (1881) 173: "Nobody can deprive us of the Church, if they would."

1858 BAGEHOT Lit. Stud. (1879) II. 206: "Nobody fancies for a moment that they are reading about anything beyond the pale of ordinary propriety."

Churchyard's site includes quotations from the works of Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and other shining lights of English-language literature. Here are only a few of the hundreds listed:

King James Version (Authorized Version) translation of the Bible, Philippians 2:3:

Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.

Shakespeare:

God send every one their heart's desire!
[Much Ado About Nothing, Act III Scene 4]

There's not a man I meet but doth salute me,
As if I were their well-acquainted friend.
[Comedy of Errors, Act IV Scene 3]

Thackeray:

No one prevents you, do they?

George Eliot:

I shouldn't like to punish anyone, even if they'd done me wrong.

Walt Whitman:

... everyone shall delight us, and we them.

Elizabeth Bowen:

He did not believe it rested anybody to lie with their head high ...

Lawrence Durrell:

You do not have to understand someone in order to love them.

Doris Lessing:

And how easy the way a man or woman would come in here, glance around, find smiles and pleasant looks waiting for them, then wave and sit down by themselves.

C. S. Lewis:

She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes. [Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter I]

Oscar Wilde:

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

The Old-Time Grammarians

According to historical linguistics, most speakers of English allowed their language to develop unimpeded during its first 800 or 900 years. No one systematically tried to whip it into submission during its evolution from Old English to Middle English to Modern English. During this period, Englisc underwent enormous changes that included an influx of thousands of Latinate words, diphthongization, vowel shifts, epentheses, metatheses, as well as syntactic and pronunciation adjustments that make it impossible for modern speakers to understand early incarnations of the language. We all know language must change; and it normally does so, says Holmes, because of variations in pronunciation and meaning (195). As the change catches on, more and more people use it, and the variation becomes the norm — that is, until the language changes again.

The grammarians of eighteenth-century England may not have been the first to try to stay the normal course of language development, but they certainly were among the most successful. They seem to have purposefully narrowed the original definition of they by tossing out its singular referents and by proscribing expressions such as him or her and he or she, deeming these constructions ungainly. Their reasons, argues Bodine, had roots in the grammarians' androcentric worldview (171). She cites the following passage from Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique, first published in 1553 (171):

Some will set the Carte before the horse, as thus. My mother and my father are both at home, even as thoughe the good man of the house ware no breaches or that the graye Mare were the better Horse. And what thoughe it often so happeneth (God wotte the more pitte) yet in speaking at the leaste, let us kepe a natural order, and set the man before the woman for maners Sake.

This thinking was supported by grammarians such as Wilson, Poole, Kirby, and others — all males — who ardently campaigned for the supremacy of the masculine gender. They declared indefinite subjects such as everyone, everybody, a person, anyone were to be treated as masculine singular; and singular they was dutifully silenced in all the best circles. They won — at least in grammar texts.

While Bodine maintains that "the prescriptive grammarians' attack on singular 'they' was socially motivated" (166), Pinker claims grammarians were motivated by economic greed. During the late eighteenth century, people began to strive for better living conditions; and one way to realize this goal was to become formally educated, which meant the upwardly mobile were obliged to copy the language of the moneyed classes. Since the grammarians of the day had succeeded in convincing educators that Latinate English was preferable to the English everyone was already speaking and writing, they felt it their duty to write new grammar texts, and publishing houses were happy to churn them out. Huge profits were realized each time a new text hit the bookstands, and so grammarians had to raise the bar each time they sat down to write a new how-to grammar book. Pinker calls this "the scandal of the language mavens":

[A]s the competition became cutthroat, the manuals tried to outdo one another by including greater numbers of increasingly fastidious rules that no refined person could afford to ignore. (386)

In truth, the lower classes were not upwardly mobile. Uneducated and too engrossed in trying to survive, the unprivileged had almost no hope of penetrating society's upper crust. And the upper-crustics made sure the lower classes were distinguished not only by their poor clothing and empty pockets but also by their unselfconscious way of speaking. Zuber and Reed argue, "In eighteenth-century England, the codification of English grammar helped to maintain class distinctions" (517). It's likely that this desire to maintain power was the real reason behind the proliferation of new grammar texts during this period. By rejecting singular they and other forms of common speech, those already in power were able to preserve the status quo of class privilege as well as male dominance.

"And God will open His loving arms to anyone who wants eternal love. He will give them everlasting joy; He will give them the only true love they will ever know." (TV evangelist)

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