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I include the following sensible remarks -- from a non-academic -- as being relevant to the writing of papers for English classes. Like the writer, I find most of the neologistic solutions to this question very ugly. For me, rewriting and using the plural are usually a way out.If Mr. Kirchner's query elicits helpful responses, I'll post them here too.
Seamus Cooney
LINGUIST List: Vol-6-1220. Thu Sep 7 1995. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 167Date: Thu, 07 Sep 1995 23:20:20 EDT
Dorine Huston's query on default genders in different languages has prompted me to write my own about English.
I currently work on a lot of internal automotive industry materials in which some default gender is needed to designate various people, but especially the customer, since the car companies want to get salespeople to stop thinking of car buyers as only male. (Interestingly, furniture industry clients always called their hypothetical customer "she".)
Obviously, masculine pronouns are out, and gender inclusiveness also eliminates the possibility of using "she". No one among us likes the cumbersome "he/she" ("he" and "she" with a hiccup in between), and especially not "s/he" (which in fact just spells "she"). The only way to go seems to be with restructuring of some sentences, and in others using gender-neutral precedents already long common in spoken English -- namely plural pronouns.
The problem is that there seem to be syntactic rules that make plural pronouns sometimes acceptable to people even in reference to singular entities, but quite grating at other times. I found in a British textbook, for example, this sentence that sounded quite natural to me:
"If a person introduces him or herself to you using his or her patronymic, use it to address them as a sign of respect.""Himself or herself", "his or her" and "them" all refer to the same single hypothetical person. The following, more consistent renderings of the same sentence would bother bother a lot of people:
"If a person introduces himself or herself to you using his or her patronymic, use it to address him or her as a sign of respect."Colloquially, I think I have even heard a "singular" form of "themselves" used for default purposes (obviously no good for written text), making the following conceivably possible:"If a person introduces themselves to you using their patronymic, use it to address them as a sign of respect."
"If a person introduces themself to you using their patronymic, use it to address them as a sign of respect."I am lost on this. Does anyone know the specifics of when people's intuition accepts they/them/their as default pronouns and when not?
James Kirchner
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