Linguist John McWhorter discusses his personal struggle to get used to “they” as a singular third person pronoun in this article at The Atlantic, “Call Them What They Wants: As more English speakers adopt the singular they and reject the gender binary, resisters will have to accept that language changes over time.” McWhorter wrote this article all the way back in 2018. I timidly entered those third-person-singular waters back after reading this article in 2018 and now I’m rather comfortable with it. In fact, I find it liberating. How convenient to get rid of the cumbersome pronoun dyad “he or she” cluttering up the ends of my sentences! What a difference a couple of years make.
McWhorter’s article covers more ground than simply this one usage. He gives us a robust reminder that language is always morphing, always on the move, just like the people who use language. Here’s an excerpt from McWhorter’s article:
It is certainly the most challenging change in language I have dealt with in my lifetime. Ever more people, rejecting the gender binary, are requesting to be referred to as they rather than as he or she. That is, we now say: Ariella isn’t wearing the green one. They think it’s time to wear their other one. I expect to get some new practice using they this way as school starts back up, with more students at universities such as the one where I teach requesting they.
Yes, practice—I am trying my best to master this new way of using they despite the fact that, make no mistake, it’s hard. In contrast to the deliberateness of writing, speaking casually is a largely subconscious, not to mention very rapid, act. In addition, pronouns, like conjunctions and suffixes, are a very deeply seated feature of language, generated from way down deep in our minds, linked to something as fundamental to human conception as selfhood in relation to the other and others. I’ve been using they in one way since the late 1960s, and was hardly expecting to have to learn a new way of using it decades later. I thought I had English pretty much under my belt.
However, just as words’ meanings are always changing—what Shakespeare meant by generous was “noble,” not “magnanimous”—pronouns never sit still. What kind of sense does it make that in Italian, lei means both she and the polite you? Isn’t it even more senseless that in German, sie (or Sie) means she, polite you, and they? Or what kind of sense does it make that in English, we use you in both the singular and the plural? Nothing feels more natural today, but in earlier English, thou was the second-person-singular form, and you was used only for two or more people.
