Gender equality: Promoting a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun
If one is a sensitive soul, what should one do when a sentence requires a third-person pronoun, but one doesn’t know if the third person one is referring to is male or female? Take this sentence, for example:
If an employee is habitually tardy, you might want to try smacking ____ on the hands with a ruler.
What pronoun would you use to fill in the blank? You would be grammatically correct to use him, but that leaves out approximately half of the population. Given the consequences for tardiness in this case, that might not bother some people, but in most cases, you would rub many in your audience the wrong way.
You can use him or her, but it’s a slightly clumsy construction, creating a bit of a hiccup in your sentence. Encountering it once isn’t bad, but try reading something that has he or she, him or her, and his or hers several times in a row (I’ve seen some employee handbooks written this way) and you’ll see what I mean; it becomes an annoying stutter in the rhythm of the writing.
English does not have any singular third person pronouns that are not gender specific. That’s changing. More and more people are opting to use they, them, and their—which are, strictly speaking, plural pronouns—to refer to a singular person when the gender of that person is unknown. This seriously vexes prescriptivists (grammarians who think that the “rules” of grammar should be fixed in stone), but English usage is always a shifting thing.
Unless you’re bound by a style guide that forbids the use of they, them, and their as singular third-person pronouns. feel free to do so. You’ll be one of the trend-setters, and the “rules” of grammar will eventually catch up with you.
Roy Jacobsen
Commenter Cheryl Stephens kindly pointed out that the “rule” against using they, them, and their as third-person singular pronouns was foisted upon an unsuspecting public by grammarians in the 18th century. Their “solution” to the problem of the Missing Generic Singular Pronoun was entirely artificial, and ignored the centuries of precedent already established by they, them, and their. They reasoned that, if the antecedent (the person the pronoun was referring to) was singular, then the pronoun must be singular. And since English had no generic personal pronoun (we mustn’t use it for a person, you know), well then the obvious choice for those 18th-century gentlemen was the masculine pronouns: he, him, and his.
Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage says “The plural pronoun is one solution devised by native speakers of English to a grammatical problem inherent in that language—and it is by no means the worst solution.” Bryan Garner, in Garner’s Modern American Usage, agrees. “Why is this usage becoming so common? It is the most convenient solution to the single biggest problem in sexist language—the generic masculine pronoun.”
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This is not, strictly speaking, correct. "They", "them", "their" were used for both plural and singular purposes until the prescriptivists started writing the grammar guides in the mid-1800s.
We are taking back the English language!
Thanks for the note. I'll have to dig into that for the details, but it sounds right. (I feel that it may have been the same lot who said a preposition is something you should never end a sentence with.)