I’m reading a mystery novel, and, again, the incessant “they” to refer to the unknown murderer is very annoying. How did Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and all the other brilliant mystery writers manage to create so many excellent novels without theying everything to death?
The English language somehow existed until now without this ugliness. Why do we have to torture it because of our generation’s fixation on “misgendering”?
P.S. At least, a character who is an FBI agent refers to the elusive killer as “this son of a bitch” and not “this gender-fluid child of an unsavory canine parent”. For now.
Clarissa's Blog 
Using ‘they’ for unknown persons is a very old feature of English. It was declared “ungrammatical” at some point and no editor would have let it get into print in Agatha Christie or Ruth Rendell’s day if either of them had been inclined to use it. But millions and millions of “uneducated” speakers of English have always used it. It’s a feature of my native dialect, and I am glad that I can use it now without being written off as a hillbilly.
LikeLike
“‘they’ for unknown persons is a very old feature of English”
Yes, so much better than ‘he’ all the time or the hideously ugly ‘he or she’…. I’ve even used it a time or two when I knew the person’s sex but not their name back in my office days I might tell someone: “You got a call while you were out. They didn’t leave a name but they said they’ll call back.”
The use of ‘they’ for known persons is annoying and those doing that need to be yelled out.
I intend to change my usage…. not in the slightest.
“declared “ungrammatical” at some point”
Unlike most languages in Europe, a lot of the judgements about grammaticality in English were established not by language specialists but by charlatans and cranks… (really — writing prescriptive grammars was a cottage industry for a time and the cranks came up with all kinds of crazy rules that no native has ever followed consistently). People forget most of them but a few have zombie existences and refuse to die….
LikeLike
Given that pretty much all serial killers are male, wouldn’t any normal person say “he”? There isn’t much unknown here because we know very well who commits this kind of crime.
LikeLike
Yes. I use they in the way Cliff talks about pretty frequently and broadly find it unobjectionable, but I would say he here. And if a they slipped in I’d edit it. Even if the novel ended up being about a rare female serial killer, this would only make the twist better.
LikeLike
Of course serial killers are 99% men, but we’re talking about grammar constructions here, so a lot depends on the exact linguistic context. If a pronoun is referring back to an indefinite pronoun like ‘someone’, ‘somebody’, ‘anyone’, ‘anybody’, then my native dialect of English uses “they” and ‘their’. Anything else feels a bit stilted or extra careful to me, it really doesn’t matter what the rest of the context is. If we take a super gendered situation to illustrate the point:
Someone left their birth control pills on the bus.
Someone left her birth control pills on the bus.
Someone left his birth control pills on the bus.
Someone left his or her birth control pills on the bus.
Birth control pills would obviously belong to a woman. But after ‘someone’ I think the most natural sounding pronoun is ‘their’, it really doesn’t matter if the someone is a woman, a man, or a monkey. ‘someone’ = ‘they/their’. The “traditional” grammar rule taught in schools is that ‘someone’ should always be followed by masculine pronouns, and I am old enough that that is what I was explicitly taught to do in school. I know our teachers would mark something like #1 as being wrong, but that’s what all of us said. They did not teach us that we could make exceptions for situations in which ‘someone’ was very likely to be a woman, so I suspect that there may still be some very rigid, old-school grammar teachers out there who would consider #3 to be the only grammatical option even though it’s totally stupid. Now, if you exchange ‘someone’ for something that is gendered like ‘some woman’, then the grammar changes for me and it has to be ‘her’ and not ‘their’.
Some woman left her birth control pills on the bus.
That’s the only option if referring back to ‘some woman’.
Speaking of traditional grammar types, I had a student once who refused to use the passive voice in a German course because she was convinced that there was something inherently wrong with the passive voice. She was an A+ level student who got almost everything right on every test, but she would get zero points on any activity involving passive voice because she absolutely refused to write sentences in the passive voice. I’m sure she knew how to do it because we practiced it a bunch (she looked like she was in pain the entire time) and she knew that that was what she was supposed to be doing. I had explained several times that Germans do not see any problems with the passive voice and formal texts are full of it, but it was like she had taken a religious vow never to use the passive voice.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Birth control pills would obviously belong to a woman. ”
But the person who left them on the bus might have been a male partner…
“had taken a religious vow never to use the passive voice.”
Both over use and absolute avoidance of passives is very annoying.
LikeLike
Why wouldn’t you simply say: “Someone left birth control pills on the bus”? If you do not know who they belong to, or even if they belong to anyone, is a possessive needed?
LikeLiked by 1 person
There’s a scene in the book where a woman is telling somebody about an employee of hers and refers to him as “they”. The sentence goes something like this: “I hired this programmer and they did a project for me.” It’s confusing to the reader who “they” are when there’s only one programmer. Plus, if she hired him, she knows he’s a man. And in a previous part of the book, the same character referred to the programmer as “he”.
This is absolutely new fad, and it’s annoying as hell.
LikeLike
“I hired this programmer and they did a project for me.”
Doesn’t seem odd to me at all… thinking a lot about my usage… and I’m starting to think of English pronouns less as category markers like they are in Spanish or German or Ukrainian and more like…. salience markers?
Comparing…
“I hired this programmer and he did a project for me.”
“I hired this programmer and they did a project for me.”
The second de-emphasizes the programmer and emphasizes the project (or ‘me’) more. Just a little but…
I think (getting all linguistic now) that third person pronouns in American English (making no claims about other countries) are individual trackers rather than just marking gender (as in German). A person mentioned as a function or type (especially if their name is not mentioned) doesn’t need ‘he’ or ‘she’, especially if you’re not going to talk about them more.
“I went to the doctor’s but they didn’t give me a referral.”
“I went to the doctor’s but she didn’t give me a referral.”
Hearing the first you assume I’m going to be talking about a referral or the reasons for not getting it and not talk about the doctor.
Hearing the second you assume I’m going to rant about what a quack the doctor (or at least I’m going to talk about said doctor more).
LikeLike
“pretty much all serial killers are male”
Point taken. In a procedural looking for a serial killer ‘they’ would sound a bit odd (though again, I sometimes used ‘they’ for generic males long before the current they/them nonsense).
And it seems that in about half of the Christie/James mysteries that I’ve read the killers are women. I like that in the later Dalgliesh novels the investigating team comes up with a nickname for the killer (like Vulcan or Noctis).
LikeLiked by 1 person
My youngest son is now using “they” even for people who are in no way genderfluid or otherwise ambiguous in their presentation. He has a genderfluid friend whom he’s known to be a boy since they were both in kindergarten; the friend looks and acts as a boy and has all stereotypical boy interests, but has long hair (common among middle-school boys) and goes by “they.” I don’t think it’s just this friend, but the whole environment, and now we have my kid who is apparently terrified that he will misgender someone, because it’s so hurtful and offensive. I had to tell him that it is perfectly fine to say I am a she, or that his grandma is a she, or that his teacher who goes by Ms. Something and couldn’t look more girly is a she. I want to be respectful to how people want to be addressed, but this is bananas that young people are expected not to use their eyes and brain to deduce what gender someone is, even though it’s something that even young children can already do.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“son is now using “they” even for people who are in no way genderfluid ”
That’s the problem when people do something for attention (about 95% of “genderfluid or “nonbinary” people) and try to impose their will on others… it backfires in unexpected ways.
They make such a fuss that people just don’t want to be bothered and their new badge of snowflakehood is now as plain (and about as interesting) as dirt.
LikeLiked by 1 person