because it doesn’t always work and i have some severe hangups about partial solutions. also i have an excessive interest in systems and rules.
the example from the conversation i was just having about this was
Susan likes math. They like science, too.
the other person agreed that this reads weirdly, and i suspect it’s because it looks like i’m trying to do this instead:
Susan likes math. Other people like it, too.
i.e., use “too” to apply the same predicate to a different subject, except the predicate is different, so then you reparse the sentence to make the subject match, and now it makes sense but the ultimate effect is that it feels a bit unnatural.
someone then pointed out that this works fine:
My new student likes math. They like science, too.
it feels very slightly iffy to me but for the most part entirely reasonable.
so the difference, i assume, is that singular-they is most commonly used for cases where the listener doesn’t expect to be able to know the gender of the subject. “Susan” is a person’s name (and deliberately a gendered one), so it sounds like the speaker is at least familiar enough to know which pronoun to use. “My new student” might suggest familiarity, but it’s not as certain, and there’s still the possibility that the speaker is deliberately obscuring the subject’s identity. (so, ultimately a problem of a language built to assume that any subject can be easily categorized as “he” or “she” in the first place.)
maybe this is because we frequently use plural-they as a handwave for a group of people we can’t identify more specifically?
meanwhile i’ve had people tell me that the first example sounds perfectly natural to them. so it’s clearly just about familiarity with that kind of use. maybe even regional.
anyway i’m well aware this is nitpicking of the highest order and i really don’t care what anyone else does; there are plenty of grammatical things i take care to do that casual english has almost completely forgotten about. i don’t even notice when no one else does them, and i don’t think anyone notices that i do them either.
but this leaves me in a sticky place because there’s nothing that’s obviously correct. the traditional thing is to just use “he” and that’s clearly not going to work. “s/he” is similarly wrong, and awkward to boot. artificial pronouns like “ze” stand out way too much as exotic, which sort of defeats the purpose of using a neutral pronoun. and singular-they just sounds awkward to me sometimes, and i would rather my own writing not feel awkward to me.
that leaves
- suck it up and use singular-they
- use spivak: e/ey, em, eir
i’ve been doing 2 for a couple years now, but i never really tried it out spoken aloud, and i know people who actively dislike it. so it’s not really a universal solution either, for more… practical reasons. also it has not caught on at all in all the time i’ve been using it, which is fairly disappointing. am i then drawing support away from the thing most likely to catch on? but it’s still clearly neutral, and it has yet to confuse anyone. mm.
i don’t know what i’ll do from here. maybe option 3, forego pronouns entirely