The Neutral Pronoun

[Orfamay Quest]

thejeff wrote:

Judy Bauer wrote:

Orfamay Quest wrote:

Scythia wrote:

I wonder if there's a regional differentiation, or perhaps generational. Because the "his or her" version sounds unwieldy to me, while the "their" version is my default writing style and matches the majority of what I read (primarily academic journal articles at the moment).

Or perhaps idiolectal, which is a pretentious way of saying "different people talk different." Any or all of those are possibilities, which is why the pipe-smoking "armchair linguist" (cf. Fillmore) has fallen somewhat out of favor and is being replaced by corpus studies and/or psychology-style subject experiments.

I'd be interested to see whether there's been any change in the 19 years since that study was published, given how much more time people now spend reading online content, which is much more "they"-friendly.

I was wondering that too.

I'm unfortunately on the road right now, so I don't have citations to hand.

[mechaPoet]

Jiggy wrote:

Fairly recently, I read an article (the topic was actually Magic: the Gathering) and the author made mention of his partner, who prefers the gender-neutral pronoun "they". He also mentioned the general community of similar folks, also using the (in that case plural) pronoun "they".

There was a paragraph in which both (the partner and the community) were mentioned, and I thought the paragraph meant one thing, but then the next paragraph seemed weird, so I went back, and I had to re-read the previous paragraph a couple of times before I figured out what was actually being said.

So yes, plurality confusion really can happen with "they". Basically, all you have to do for it to be confusing is to be discussing a topic that references both an individual and a group. That's all it takes.

I've run into it as a speaker, as well: if I'm telling my wife a story about a funny thread here on the forums, I'll likely refer to a poster of unknown gender as "they", but then also refer to other posters in the thread collectively as "they", and I sometimes end up having to go back and re-phrase for clarity.

I don't have a superior suggestion, but some folks' notion that using "they" doesn't produce a meaningful amount of confusion is naïve at best.

Sure, there are some confusing instances of this usage. But it's not terribly different in the amount of confusion if someone is talking about two different people who both use "she." Pronouns are good at their job of standing in for a noun, but sometimes language is confusing, context dependant, or not put together in a clear way. Ambiguity happens in language generally, all the time.

"They" as a generic singular is fairly well established. "They" as a specific individual's pronoun is less so, but still valid. Extending the first usage to the second isn't that different, and someone who speaks English already knows how to conjugate and do subject-verb agreement with "they."

[David knott 242]

Just be glad none of us have the lifespans of elves. If we did, there would still be some holdouts opposed to using the originally exclusively plural "you" to refer to just one person instead of the proper "thou" or "thee".

[Scythia]

mechaPoet wrote:

Jiggy wrote:

Fairly recently, I read an article (the topic was actually Magic: the Gathering) and the author made mention of his partner, who prefers the gender-neutral pronoun "they". He also mentioned the general community of similar folks, also using the (in that case plural) pronoun "they".

There was a paragraph in which both (the partner and the community) were mentioned, and I thought the paragraph meant one thing, but then the next paragraph seemed weird, so I went back, and I had to re-read the previous paragraph a couple of times before I figured out what was actually being said.

So yes, plurality confusion really can happen with "they". Basically, all you have to do for it to be confusing is to be discussing a topic that references both an individual and a group. That's all it takes.

I've run into it as a speaker, as well: if I'm telling my wife a story about a funny thread here on the forums, I'll likely refer to a poster of unknown gender as "they", but then also refer to other posters in the thread collectively as "they", and I sometimes end up having to go back and re-phrase for clarity.

I don't have a superior suggestion, but some folks' notion that using "they" doesn't produce a meaningful amount of confusion is naïve at best.

Sure, there are some confusing instances of this usage. But it's not terribly different in the amount of confusion if someone is talking about two different people who both use "she." Pronouns are good at their job of standing in for a noun, but sometimes language is confusing, context dependant, or not put together in a clear way. Ambiguity happens in language generally, all the time.

"They" as a generic singular is fairly well established. "They" as a specific individual's pronoun is less so, but still valid. Extending the first usage to the second isn't that different, and someone who speaks English already knows how to conjugate and do subject-verb agreement with "they."

Also, it doesn't seem any worse than the confusion caused when speaking to multiple people and saying "you" either to refer to an individual or switching between individual and group usage. Yet somehow we muddle through that, and you is accepted as okay to use.

[thegreenteagamer]

Didn't Futurama solve this conundrum years ago with the movie The Beast With a Billion Backs?

Schklee, and conjugations thereof.

[Chris Lambertz]

Removed a post. Don't deliberately bait others in this thread. Thanks.

[Kryzbyn]

Dunno how relevant this will be, but here goes...

So, watching Enterprise the other night, they introduced a species that was tri-gendered. They could not procreate without the inclusion of the "cogenitor" person. They didn't get into details about it, but the thing I found short sighted by the writers, is they referred to the cogenitor as an "it". That didn't seem right, as surely not having a binary existence with 2 sexes, they would have a separate term for the third sex, not gender neutral. The cogenitor did in fact have a gender, and it wasn't neutral. I suppose the writers thought "wow we don't want to open a can of worms here" but they could have made up a term, instead of going with the safer "it". I'm not even sure "male" or "female" worked for the other two genders either, as far as we understand procreation.

[Orfamay Quest]

Kryzbyn wrote:

So, watching Enterprise the other night, they introduced a species that was tri-gendered. They could not procreate without the inclusion of the "cogenitor" person. They didn't get into details about it, but the thing I found short sighted by the writers, is they referred to the cogenitor as an "it". That didn't seem right, as surely not having a binary existence with 2 sexes, they would have a separate term for the third sex, not gender neutral. The cogenitor did in fact have a gender, and it wasn't neutral. I suppose the writers thought "wow we don't want to open a can of worms here" but they could have made up a term, instead of going with the safer "it". I'm not even sure "male" or "female" worked for the other two genders either, as far as we understand procreation.

What language were you watching the episode in?

I'm sure that the trigendered species has a term for the third sex (sex, is, in fact, the correct term here, since we're talking about biological processes). I'm also confident that the episode you watched was in English, and there is no English term that would be understandable as a pronoun referring to a "cogenitor" sex that doesn't exist among humans. Remember that the show is primarily designed for a human (and English-speaking) audience. There are a lot worse problems with translation in mass media with a hell of a lot less justification.

My apologies if I'm wrong and you were actually watching the show in the "original" Blavingarian. (And if so, how much did you pay for the bootleg DVDs?)

[Sissyl]

Player of Games by Iain Banks had a similar setup, with male, female and apex. In a footnote, it is explained that for english readers, characters from this species will have whatever pronoun is appropriate for their role. The hero then only interacts with apexes, which are called he.

[Kryzbyn]

Orfamay Quest wrote:

Kryzbyn wrote:

So, watching Enterprise the other night, they introduced a species that was tri-gendered. They could not procreate without the inclusion of the "cogenitor" person. They didn't get into details about it, but the thing I found short sighted by the writers, is they referred to the cogenitor as an "it". That didn't seem right, as surely not having a binary existence with 2 sexes, they would have a separate term for the third sex, not gender neutral. The cogenitor did in fact have a gender, and it wasn't neutral. I suppose the writers thought "wow we don't want to open a can of worms here" but they could have made up a term, instead of going with the safer "it". I'm not even sure "male" or "female" worked for the other two genders either, as far as we understand procreation.

What language were you watching the episode in?

I'm sure that the trigendered species has a term for the third sex (sex, is, in fact, the correct term here, since we're talking about biological processes). I'm also confident that the episode you watched was in English, and there is no English term that would be understandable as a pronoun referring to a "cogenitor" sex that doesn't exist among humans. Remember that the show is primarily designed for a human (and English-speaking) audience. There are a lot worse problems with translation in mass media with a hell of a lot less justification.

My apologies if I'm wrong and you were actually watching the show in the "original" Blavingarian. (And if so, how much did you pay for the bootleg DVDs?)

Heh, no silly Illithid. It was in English. However, I did give the "universal translator" idea some thought, as in when they said the word for whatever "male" was translated to male in English, "female" to female, "it" for cogenitor, etc.

But then I thought, in other episodes when a word doesnt translate, the people hear the unedited word, because the UT has no comparison for it.
So, the writers invented a race out of thin air, the ycould have also created words out of thin air, and had the alien characters discuss them and their significance.

[I'm Hiding In Your Closet]

What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power?

Nope. Just the understanding that gender is mere mind control.

And gold and power.

[Judy Bauer]

Judy Bauer wrote:

I'd be interested to see whether there's been any change in the 19 years since that study was published, given how much more time people now spend reading online content, which is much more "they"-friendly.

Lo! I was just reading Stephen Pinker's The Sense of Style (tl;dr: linguist analyzing writing style advice based on linguistic data and a panel of folks who work on dictionaries), and he says

Quote:

Experiments that measure readers' reading comprehension times to the thousandth of a second have shown that singular they causes little or no delay, but generic he slows them down a lot (Foertsch & Gernsbacher, 1997; M. Liberman, "Prescriptivist Science," Language Log, 2008).

[Alzrius]

Judy Bauer wrote:

Judy Bauer wrote:

I'd be interested to see whether there's been any change in the 19 years since that study was published, given how much more time people now spend reading online content, which is much more "they"-friendly.

Lo! I was just reading Stephen Pinker's The Sense of Style (tl;dr: linguist analyzing writing style advice based on linguistic data and a panel of folks who work on dictionaries), and he says

Quote:

Experiments that measure readers' reading comprehension times to the thousandth of a second have shown that singular they causes little or no delay, but generic he slows them down a lot (Foertsch & Gernsbacher, 1997; M. Liberman, "Prescriptivist Science," Language Log, 2008).

If that's the sum total of what Pinker says about this citation, then he's leaving out quite a bit of context.

The citation here is for a 2008 paper (the M. Liberman citation) that looks at the Foertsch & Gernsbacher 1997 paper and then compares it to a 2007 paper (A. J. Sanford & R. Filik, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60(2) 171-178, 2007).

In his paper, Liberman relates that the Foertsch & Gernsbacher paper determined that the singular they didn't impose any extra cognitive load as compared to "stereotype-mismatched pronouns (e.g. "truck driver … she" or "nurse … he")"

Liberman then goes on to compare this to the 2007 Sanford & Filik paper, which looks at "The plural pronouns they and them are used to refer to individuals with unknown gender and when a random allocation of gender is undesirable. Despite this apparently felicitous usage, “singular they/them” should raise processing problems under the theory that pronouns seek gender- and number-matched antecedents."

Liberman notes that Sanford and Filik's data shows the following:

Quote:

For him or her with a singular antecedent, the average was 1380 milliseconds, while for them with a singular antecedent, the average total reading time was 1414 milliseconds — a 34 millisecond difference! This difference was statistically significant, at least when the times were compared segment by segment. But the time for reading all three segments was only about 2.4% slower on average.

In contrast, him or her with a plural antecedent required an average of 1521 msec to read all three segments, while them with a plural antecedent took an average of 1315 msec, or 206 msec faster. That's a difference of about 16%.

In other words, using "they" after having already established the presence of multiple people was faster than using a singular pronoun - whether male or female - after having established the presence of multiple people. Liberman further notes their conclusion:

Quote:

While the use of they as a genderless “singular” referential pronoun in certain contexts certainly occurs and does not seem to cause problems of felicity from the point of view of casual observation, some processing difficulties were nevertheless observed in our eye-tracking study. Earlier researchers (Foertsch & Gernsbacher, 1997) found that with neutral, apparently genderless, antecedents like someone, or a runner subsequent clauses referring to that individual by he or she, or they, revealed no reliable disadvantage in the case of using they. On the surface, this might be taken as compatible with the position that there is indeed no processing disadvantage to using they as a genderless singular. In the present experiment, we increased the sensitivity of the design in two ways. First, we used continuous eye-tracking, enabling more subtle measurement of any possible patterns of disruption. Secondly, we compared the effects of genderless referential plural antecedents with that of genderless singular referential antecedents. On total time for the pronoun region, we observed a strong, conventional, number-mismatch effect, such that plural pronouns created less processing disruption in the context of plural antecedents than in the context of genderless singular antecedents.

This result is compatible with the view that after encountering a plural pronoun (they, them), a search is initiated for a plural antecedent in the mental representation of the discourse and not for one that could be either plural or singular. So where does this leave the singular use of they/them? Since it is in common use, we suggest that although it gives rise to a mismatch, it is rapidly accommodated as an acceptable deviation. This is quite unlike the case with singular pronouns in the context of plural antecedents, because these are not in common use and, we claim, do not make sense without making an inference like “he or she refers to just one of the plurality in the antecedent”.

Most important, however, seems to be Liberman's ultimate conclusion after looking these papers over:

Quote:

But crucially, despite references to questions of usage, these papers are mainly oriented towards a debate among psycholinguists about the nature of pronoun processing, not towards a debate about pronoun usage among providers of writing advice. And as a result, the experiments don't directly address the issue that really matters in most practical cases — how should you refer to a non-referential singular indefinite antecedent ("anyone"; "a student"; etc.) when you need or want to leave sex unspecified? To be relevant to this real usage debate, experiments would need to test they against "he or she" (or "she or he", or "that person", or whatever); and would also need to check systematically for the cognitive load imposed by attempts to use he as a default pronoun.

So the idea that "singular they causes little or no delay, but generic he slows them down a lot," as Pinker notes, is eschewing a very large degree of data, to the point of not accurately representing the results...which don't really speak to the issue of wanting a non-gendered singular pronoun that isn't confusing anyway.

[Cthulhusquatch]

I am pretty new to being around transfolk, non-binary, non-conforming, genderfluid... what have you...

In general I use whichever of the binary pronouns they prefer, or I simply avoid pronouns. Admittedly much easier since everyone I am around uses binary pronouns.

If I actually knew any that used neutral pronouns personally, enough that pronoun use would be unavoidable... well... I'd cross that bridge if I came to it.

It's difficult because back before I went right-wing... I was openly bi... and back then you didn't all of the new stuff. It was L G B and very rarely at the time... T... not much else. Queer was also a bad word.

Now that I'm heading further left again socially (just not in all ways), and I am at this point a nearly open pansexual (this is actually the first time that I admitted it outside of a closed FB group)... I'm having to learn all the new stuff...

So... the bottom line is that if it is gender neutral, I avoid pronouns unless I absolutely have no choice. I'm a middle-age right-leaning libertarian cis man that spent years in the closet and further right... so you can see why it takes getting used to for me. Moreso than gendering transfolk or genderfluid correctly.

At this point though I just warn new LGBT friends that I'm rough around the edges and might offend them. I'm always learning and evolving though, so maybe I won't be so rough at some point.

[Kobold Catgirl]

Jiggy wrote:

Fairly recently, I read an article (the topic was actually Magic: the Gathering) and the author made mention of his partner, who prefers the gender-neutral pronoun "they". He also mentioned the general community of similar folks, also using the (in that case plural) pronoun "they".

There was a paragraph in which both (the partner and the community) were mentioned, and I thought the paragraph meant one thing, but then the next paragraph seemed weird, so I went back, and I had to re-read the previous paragraph a couple of times before I figured out what was actually being said.

So yes, plurality confusion really can happen with "they". Basically, all you have to do for it to be confusing is to be discussing a topic that references both an individual and a group. That's all it takes.

I've run into it as a speaker, as well: if I'm telling my wife a story about a funny thread here on the forums, I'll likely refer to a poster of unknown gender as "they", but then also refer to other posters in the thread collectively as "they", and I sometimes end up having to go back and re-phrase for clarity.

Yeah, it is confusing when multiple people in a paragraph have the same pronoun. The same issue crops up to the exact same extent when you're talking about two people who use "he" or "she"—the only difference is we're more used to those usages. A good writer learns tricks to work around it, or their readers will think they don't know what they're doing, and they'll decide they should read a different book. ;P

[Caineach]

For those b+*+#ing about singular they, an 18th century rant about singular you

[Jiggy]

Could have said "for those who have an issue with" in order to communicate the same message, sans the belittlement of holders of opposing viewpoints.

I don't remember exactly what I posted in here before, but I know I've since come around to acceptance of the singular "they". However, you were not helpful/relevant in making that happen. Change how you approach disagreements, and maybe next time you will be.

[Jessica Price]

Jiggy wrote:

Could have said "for those who have an issue with" in order to communicate the same message, sans the belittlement of holders of opposing viewpoints.

I don't remember exactly what I posted in here before, but I know I've since come around to acceptance of the singular "they". However, you were not helpful/relevant in making that happen. Change how you approach disagreements, and maybe next time you will be.

"I'll support people respecting your wish to be called by your pronouns, but only if you ask in ways I like."

That's known as tone policing. Don't do it.

[Hitdice]

To be fair Jessica, the Paizo mods do plenty of tone policing of their own. Frequently after having removed the offending statement.

Ugh, that probably sounds like I'm against tone policing; I'm not, I just don't know how else you'd set and maintain the proper tone.

[Jiggy]

Jessica Price wrote:

Jiggy wrote:

Could have said "for those who have an issue with" in order to communicate the same message, sans the belittlement of holders of opposing viewpoints.

I don't remember exactly what I posted in here before, but I know I've since come around to acceptance of the singular "they". However, you were not helpful/relevant in making that happen. Change how you approach disagreements, and maybe next time you will be.

"I'll support people respecting your wish to be called by your pronouns, but only if you ask in ways I like."

That's known as tone policing. Don't do it.

Didn't do it.

EDIT: More specifically, I very clearly stated that I had already decided to use the desired pronouns, prior to and independently of Caineach's post. I then also, additionally, separately suggested a way for them to be nicer and perhaps find more success in the future.

The connection of dependency, that I will only say "they" if I'm asked a certain way, is something you made up yourself.

You criticized me for your own words, rather than mine.

I request that you not do that anymore. And whether you honor that request or not, I'm still going to try to listen and learn and get better and better at understanding and respecting the people around me.

[Lemmy]

I don't know... I try to use "they", although it still sounds weird to refer to an specific person by that noun. I heard "he" is technically correct, grammatically speaking.

In any case, I often slip and use "he" or "she" in place of "it", since my mother language is Portuguese, and there's no "it" (or gender-neutral "they") in Portuguese... Nearly every word has a completely arbitrary "gender".

e.g.: Apple ("maçã")? Feminine. Melon ("Melão")? Masculine.

"You", surprisingly, has no gender... It does differentiate between singular and plural, though ("você" or "vocês").

- - -

When it comes to specific people, I'll call people whatever noun they prefer, because, honestly... I don't give a f!!!.
If they want to be called "he", "she" or "they"... So be it. It means nothing to me, anyway, so I might as well please them.