this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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Nice ditty.
Regional dialect, fluidity of language, variety - even habit.
Oh, I do respectfully disagree with that, especially when you cite medieval English but reference an American language dictionary as your source.
I could just as viably give "his or hers" as equally valid as "theirs", because it is. We're not newspaper headline writers, nobody penalises us if we use a few more characters for any reason. And you could switch back and forth between them both for variety.
Thank you :)
Those explain why it might be the first thing people reach to, but I wasn't trying to demonise that. I was trying to offer an argument for the alternative that I consider both more convenient to write and read and more inclusive. Habits can be changed.
Does the nature of the source invalidate the content and points it makes? English is still English, and I was looking for a source that wasn't Wikipedia, but also was publically accessible. I could have just copied all of Wikipedia's references, but most of them are books or journals that I don't expect people to have access to and didn't individually check. We could debate here what burden of proof is to be expected in an online debate, but I didn't think the matter to be worth serious discussion.
The point is the same: there are plenty of historical examples of it being used. To be clear, this is a pre-emptive counterargument to a point I've occasionally seen made: That the singular they was a new invention and should be rejected on that ground. If past usage has no bearing on your current decision, that argument obviously holds no weight.
In the latter case, I contend that the increasing spread, particularly in the context of that spread, legitimises its use for that purpose. I fall in with the descriptivists: Rules should describe contemporary usage, not prescribe it.
Ultimately, I believe using "they" for gender neutrality is more inclusive for identities outside the binary. I consider the difference in usage trivial enough that the difference in respect justifies it.
But that's not what you did, at first anyway. You were looking for an argument. You asked someone to justify something that to you is a slight, with no way of knowing whether the other person intended it that way. They got defensive because they have no idea what you're getting at, from their perspective you're just saying "you said something wrong, this is right" without explaining why.