Fine-Tuning 16, The Generic "He" and How to Avoid It

Dupre, I'm glad to learn that the editors at CMS have come to their senses. Let's face it. "They" ain't singular.

February 02, 2005

THE CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE --- AND GRAMMAR
In the 1890s a proofreader working for the University of Chicago Press prepared a single sheet of guidance on typographic fundamentals and house style. It was augmented over time, and grew into a full style manual. The latest version was published in 2003 as the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. From the first sheet with printing on it to the last it has xviii + 958 = 976 pages, an increase in bulk of almost three orders of magnitude from that original information sheet. I finally ordered the 15th edition at the LSA book exhibit in January, when I saw that it included a new 93-page chapter on ‘Grammar and Usage’. My copy just arrived. Unfortunately, I now see, the new chapter does not represent an improvement.

The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) is an unparalleled resource for those engaged in publishing, particularly of academic material. But the Press decided to farm out the topic of grammar and usage, and the writer they selected was Bryan A. Garner, a former associate editor of the Texas Law Review who now teaches at Southern Methodist University School of Law and has written several popular books on usage and style. His chapter is unfortunately full of repetitions of stupidities of the past tradition in English grammar — more of them than you could shake a stick at.

Presenting a representative sample would take a long time. Suffice it to say that on on page 177 he appears to claim that progressive clauses are always active (making clauses like Our premises are being renovated impossible); on page 179 he states that English verbs have seven inflected forms, including a present subjunctive, a past subjunctive, and an imperative (utter nonsense); on page 187 he reveals that (although he agrees, like every other grammarian, that the misnamed "split infinitive" is grammatical) he thinks that the adverb is "splitting the verb" in this construction (it isn't; it's between two separate words); on page 188 he describes word sequences like with reference to as "phrasal prepositions" (they aren't); and so it goes on and on. (I'm not asking you to just accept my word that these are analytical mistakes. Full argumentation on these points, and alternative analyses that make sense, can be found in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, a work that was available in published form a full year before the Preface was added to the 15th edition of CMS. A few days of revision would have sufficed to remove the blunders from Garner's chapter.)

When the University of Chicago Press started on the revisions that led to CMS 15, they could have lifted the phone and made an on-campus call to the late, great James McCawley, a professor in the Department of Linguistics there throughout his long career, and an author of many books with the Press. They could have asked him for advice. They did not, clearly. McCawley knew the field of English syntax as well as anyone alive, and would perhaps have offered to do the chapter himself, or to read and critique the chapter when it was submitted, or to advise them on who might be chosen to do write it. But once again, people who had ample opportunity to get expert help in dealing with a quintessentially linguistic question of great importance made their decisions without (it seems) consulting anyone in the one field focused on matters linguistic. (I say "once again" because I'm thinking of Mark's recent masterful critique of the College Board and its ignorant policies in designing putative tests of grammar knowledge.) They commissioned a tired rehash of traditional grammar repeating centuries-old errors of analysis instead of trying to obtain a more up-to-date presentation. A real lost opportunity that has lessened the authority of a wonderful reference book, one that on topics from punctuation to citation to indexing to editing can really be trusted. Just avert your eyes from the grammar chapter; while not completely without merit (it moves on from Strunk and White), it just isn't trustworthy in the way the rest of the book is.

Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at February 2, 2005 12:40 PM

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001869.html

Let's face it. "They" ain't singular.

Everyone knows each other
April 26, 2008 @ 1:49 pm · Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Prescriptivist Poppycock, singular "they"


"Everyone knows each other", said someone on BBC Radio 4 this morning, speaking about some tight-knit community. And instantly I saw that this was the key to a definitive argument against the logic of the opponents of singular they. I wonder if I can make you see how awesomely beautiful the insight is.

The -s suffix on the present-tense verb knows tells us that the subject is morphosyntactically singular. That is, it counts as singular for purposes of subject-verb agreement. But each other, famously, requires a semantically plural subject. That is why "They know each other" is grammatical and *"He knows each other" is not.

From this and nothing else it follows that semantic plurality and morphosyntactic singularity are compatible in English. No prescriptivist has suggested that there is something grammatically wrong with "Everyone knows each other". But because of that, the logical objection to singular 'they' just collapses. "Everyone knows themselves" has no grammatically relevant property that isn't already instantiated by "Everyone knows each other".


I recently discussed the ravings of the apparently half-mad David Gelernter's description of the consequences of singular they (which he falsely believes was a malign invention of feminists some time "since the 1970s"): he said that grammar simply "collapsed in a heap after agreement between subject and pronoun was declared to be optional." He means antecedent and pronoun. But there is no failure of agreement.

Syntactically, when 'everyone' is a subject it demands singular agreement on the verb of its clause; semantically, when it is an antecedent it denotes a collectivity of human beings and thus allows plural anaphoric elements.

Everyone, including Gelernter (surely), would agree that its meaning is fully compatible with plural predicates, so that "Everyone knew each other" is grammatical. What happens in "Everyone knows each other" is that you see a plural-requiring predicate and a singular verb in the same clause. And "Everyone knows themselves" simply illustrates the same point with a reflexive pronoun instead of a reciprocal.

Avoid singular 'they' if you want to; nobody is making you use it. But don't ever think that it is new (it goes back to early English centuries ago), or that it is illogical (there is no logical conflict between being syntactically singular and semantically plural), or that it is ungrammatical (it is used by the finest writers who ever used English, writers who uncontroversially knew what they were doing).

By the way, Arnold Zwicky points out to me that there are verbs like 'disperse' that can only have collectivity-denoting subjects, and this yields the possibility of cases where the anaphoric pronoun for 'everyone' must be 'they', like "Everyone dispersed when they heard the shots". He, like 'he' or 'she', would be simply unimaginable here.

This tells us that the logical case against singular-anteceded 'they' is really in tatters. Gelernter's reasoning has collapsed in a heap, one might say. If "Everyone dispersed when they heard the shots" is fine, why should we assume there would have to be anything logically or grammatically wrong with "Everyone gets out of the way when they hear gunshots" ?

If the evidence was clear that people never said such things, we grammarians would have to accept it, of course. But instead the evidence is that everyone says them all the time. So we have a logically impeccable construction that expert users of the language regularly employ and experienced listeners unhesitatingly accept. I wonder what more one would need to take something to be grammatical.

April 26, 2008 @ 1:49 pm · Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Prescriptivist poppycock, singular "they"

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=89

JTT, "They" is never singular.

When a person makes a mistake, he or she should admit his or her error, learn from it, and move on.

What's wrong with re-writing the sentence to avoid the personal pronoun altogether? "A person who makes a mistake should admit it, learn from it, and move on." That seems much less contorted.

To suggest that there are certain things we can't say in language because there is a rule that isn't a rule is complete and utter nonsense.

JTT, I read the article once. That was enough, thanks.

You can say that you're right and I'm wrong. I think we're having a difference of opinion. I could probably find experts who disagree with your experts. Not gonna do that.

Third, and the bottom line here. It makes no sense to ME. Period. "They" is a word that refers to more than one thing. Period. I will not be moved. I may ultimately have to follow along with your ideas if I'm paid to, but I will never agree. And I will probably mutter a dirty word every time I come to something that I don't like not changing.

For what it's worth, I happen to know that Roberta's authority of choice is The Chicago Manual of Style. My copy of this book ---15th edition, section 5-43---says to rephrase the sentence. (Their example is: "Some child left a lunch box on the bus.")

For what it's worth, I happen to know that Roberta's authority of choice is The Chicago Manual of Style. My copy of this book ---15th edition, section 5-43---says to rephrase the sentence. (Their example is: "Some child left a lunch box on the bus.")

I've not read through this thread, and i'm certainly not going to do it now.

I would ask, what is wrong with "one?"

Avoiding sexist language is not about linguistics. It's about your credibility as a writer. The problem with the gender-neutral "he" isn't that it's bad English;