They Can't Take That Away from Me

Even as a child I was a voracious reader, in fact some of my earliest memories are of reading books. This deep and prolonged exposure to the written word, to literature, has given me an almost innate sense of grammar. (Though anyone who's read Chomsky's non-political oeuvre is aware there's a school of thought that says grammar by its very existance is innate.)

And so while I may not know how to concisely define either the subjunctive or the indicative, or be able to clearly state how one conjugates the pluperfect, or even confidently delineate why one hyphenates a compound adjectival phrase but not an adverbial one, by virtue of being well read it seems I can craft a passably grammatical sentence.

Yet like many people, I've been frustrated by the seeming lack of a grammatically acceptable, universally inclusive pronoun that can represent a whole comprised of one or both genders, and one person or multiple people. Specifically I've been frustrated that the pronoun "they" seemed to fit the bill, but was formally defined as being plural and thus not appropriate for the task.

Therefore I was quite delighted to see John Gruber at Daring Fireball post a link to the On Language column in The New York Times Magazine which not only defended "they" as both singular and plural, but stated that there was a historical precedent for using "they" to represent nouns both one and many, both masculine and feminine.

This will surprise a few purists, but for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine. Nobody seemed to mind that they, them and their were officially plural. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, writers were comfortable using they with an indefinite pronoun like everybody because it suggested a sexless plural."

Since Chaucer‽ Since the late 1300's‽ Then why was my high-school English teacher (metaphorically) rapping my knuckles for "misusing" plural pronouns in the 1980's‽ (No worries, I've constrained all my interrobangs to this paragraph.)

Using "they" in this pluripotent way has always felt right to me, almost instinctually. Now we have proper grammarians providing a historical framework for this usage, and encouraging the Twitterati to keep pushing this now-common use until it becomes standard once again. Bless them.

Post	Reference	More Info
They Can't Take That Away from Me	Song written by George and Ira Gershwin, performed by Billie Holiday (among many, many others)