/u/Atario decrees that the singular "they" is wrong and he shall not conform to such wrongness! (np.reddit.com)
badlinguistics
34 ups - 7 downs = 27 votes
117 comments submitted at 06:56:45 on May 2, 2014 by awrf
/u/Atario decrees that the singular "they" is wrong and he shall not conform to such wrongness! (np.reddit.com)
badlinguistics
34 ups - 7 downs = 27 votes
117 comments submitted at 06:56:45 on May 2, 2014 by awrf
>I hate it and I refuse. He, she, or it. Pick.
Maybe it's just me, but I always got the sense that when a human being was referred to as "it", it was usually meant to dehumanize them.
Plus, it insists that trans* people aren't actually real.
It's a long established principal in English that we don't use it to refer to persons. Doing so is thus loaded with a great deal of cultural baggage such that it is impossible not to regard its use as demeaning and dehumanizing.
I only ever use it to refer to pets or unborn babies that I don't know the sex of. Apart from the fact they "hate" using "they" as singular, I liked the person they were replying to's alternative of "thon". Mostly because some older people where I live say it to mean "that".
Are you from Yorkshire? Just out of curiosity. My housemates are from York and they say "youns" sometimes but not "thon".
Scotland (Fife to be specific). I'd never use it myself so I might not have it down quite right. According to wiktionary it's an alternative to "yon" (yonder). So my dad (who says it very rarely) might say "Thon pub looks like a dump". I've probably heard it a couple of dozen times in my entire life so it's hard to put it into a sentence.
What does "youns" mean? Second-person plural? EDIT: And what's the pronunciation?
It's like "you ones". Second person plural. Sounds like "yewens" if there was such a word.
"Yinz" is a term in some places in the US, if I'm not mistaken, along the same lines.
I'd never heard of that before using Reddit.
It's from Pittsburgh. It's also front and rounded, so it's really /jœnz/.
And not with a schwa?
That's correct.
> The problem is not language change. It is language degradation. There are plenty of changes I like because they're useful and better than the old way. But "hey, man, change is change, it's all the same and there's nuthin' you can dooooo" is an intellectually lazy shortcut out of having to make decisions.
That's right, boys and girls, languages change because people make deliberate decisions to change the way they speak. That's how it works. Decisions.
>>Thousands of people use singular 'they' without any communication problems whatsoever.
>Thousands of people also go to Google and type in "microsoft", then click on one of the results, rather than just typing "microsoft.com" in the address bar. And they get along "just fine". Does that mean that's the way they should do it?
Because those are clearly equivalent. And frankly, if somebody googles "microsoft" and it works for them, who cares? Oh wait, you do, for some reason.
>[y'all and youse are] only in use by a certain subset of the population, and using them heavily marks you.
Why is this a bad thing, again? Is it because people are prescriptive idiots who look down on people who don't talk exactly like them? I think it is!
>>Saying that one language variant over another is like saying one race is better than another.
>This is patently absurd. A language where you say "gleep" or "glorp" in long, eye-glazing patterns to achieve meaning is demonstrably inferior to, say, Urdu.
Which would be why there are no languages that work that way. All languages that people actually speak are more or less equivalent in terms of "efficiency", clarity, ability for native speakers to learn, etc. etc. If a language wasn't, then it would never develop naturally in the first place, and if people started off using an "inefficient" language (let's say an auxlang), it would change through their usage to become "efficient" and usable (like Esperanto, which has changed a fair bit since its creation, and just like every other language, has the purists who think this signifies the end of the world.)
> Decisions
Reminds me of someone in one of my classes who thought people who used a glottal stop in e.g. the word 'glottal' were 'being lazy', as though people had sat down and said 'Speaking's costing me a lot of effort, I wonder if there are any phonemes I can pronounce in a less energy-intensive fashion?'
"Let's do an analysis of the relative energy efficiency of occluding the glottis vs tapping the tongue against the alveolar ridge."
"We've already eliminated the letter g from the end of gerunds and h from the start of words so this should provide us with a 30% energy saving overall. Future generations of Cockneys will thank us."
I'm imagining a linguistic version of Jon Taffer yelling something like "Every single time you use 'like' as a discourse particle, YOU'RE THROWING AWAY PRODUCTIVITY! YOUR OVERPRONUNCIATION HAS COST THIS BAR ELEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS IN THE PAST MONTH!"
I disagree strongly that "youse" marks you heavily. People of various dialects use it. You could be Steven Gerrard or that fella from Futurama who says "hey yous guyses".
Just guessing from what else that guy wrote, but I think he meant it "marks you" as being less intelligent, not where you're from.
Oh. I was also getting at the fact that Gerrard has loads of money and the Futurama character sleeps on cardboard.
>There are plenty of changes I like because they're useful and better than the old way.
>[y'all and youse are] only in use by a certain subset of the population, and using them heavily marks you.
looks like even if a change is "useful" he still won't use it because he doesn't want to be classed with a certain group of people. lmao wut
Y'all and all y'all are extremely useful words. Especially all y'all. English doesn't really have a pronoun that can be used specifically to mean the entire group.
You could mean one person, a small subset of the group, multiple subsets of the group, everybody but one person in the group or the whole group, or anything in between.
All y'all is used to mean the entire group that's being spoken to (or sometimes about depending on the circumstances--such as one person talking to a Star Trek fan and saying "Man all y'all Star Trek fans are such nerds")
That reminds me of a recent conversation I had here. I learned that plants make decisions in the same way people do.
>That's right, boys and girls, languages change because people make deliberate decisions to change the way they speak. That's how it works. Decisions.
In a lot of cases, they do. In a lot of cases, they don't. Not sure what your point is.
>Because those are clearly equivalent.
I thought it was an apt analogy. You have a problem with it?
>And frankly, if somebody googles "microsoft" and it works for them, who cares? Oh wait, you do, for some reason.
"I don't care, therefore no one should." Ok.
>>[y'all and youse are] only in use by a certain subset of the population, and using them heavily marks you.
>Why is this a bad thing, again?
Why is it bad to be marked in a poorly-percieved light? Try it and report back to us. I'm sure you'll find it delightful.
>Is it because people are prescriptive idiots who look down on people who don't talk exactly like them? I think it is!
I suppose the reasons you don't say "y'all" or the like have nothing to do with those idiots', being the enlightened person you are. It's just a coincidence.
>Which would be why there are no languages that work that way. All languages that people actually speak are more or less equivalent in terms of "efficiency", clarity, ability for native speakers to learn, etc. etc.
You "etc. etc."ed over the point. It is 100% possible for any given usage to be measurably better than another, and to pretend it's not possible is sticking one's head in the sand. Not that that leaves one without plenty of company.
> It is 100% possible for any given usage to be measurably better than another, and to pretend it's not possible is sticking one's head in the sand.
Measured how? By what criteria? Please enlighten us.
> In a lot of cases, they do. In a lot of cases, they don't. Not sure what your point is.
My point is that language change almost never is a result of conscious decision-making. Who decided to start using "hound" to refer to a specific type of dog, as opposed to all canines? Who decided to start the Great Vowel Shift? Nobody did. These things just happened, for a wide variety of reasons that almost never include conscious thought.
Consider this partial list of some of the possible causes of semantic change. Most of them do not involve conscious decisions, but rather subconscious ones.
> I thought it was an apt analogy. You have a problem with it?
Obviously. People use "they" in the singular because it is convenient and fills a semantic role in English that no other pronoun does. They have done this for literally hundreds of years. This is in no way comparable to your Google analogy.
> I suppose the reasons you don't say "y'all" or the like have nothing to do with those idiots', being the enlightened person you are.
"Y'all" is not part of my idiolect because my dialect is Inland North, and y'all is not a part of that dialect. I never made a conscious decision to use or not use y'all.
> It is 100% possible for any given usage to be measurably better than another, and to pretend it's not possible is sticking one's head in the sand.
PROVE IT.
> It is 100% possible for any given usage to be measurably better than another
That’s bullshit. I would challenge you to find a measurement, but I already know that you can’t. Many people before you have tried, and all have failed under the tyrrany of empirical observation and testing.
Guy, you've just waltzed into a hive of people who literally think about language more often than you do. What you hope to accomplish by showcasing your ignorance is beyond me.
>hive
I always thought of it more as a den, or lair.
Let's settle on cocoon
> I suppose the reasons you don't say "y'all" or the like have nothing to do with those idiots', being the enlightened person you are. It's just a coincidence.
I do use "y'all". I use it all the time. It is a very useful word.
>It is 100% possible for any given usage to be measurably better than another, and to pretend it's not possible is sticking one's head in the sand.
On what measure? Why don't you write a paper about it?
Oh, that's right. Because you don't even have an argument here, let alone an objective measurement. All you have is a feeling - a feeling that your usage is superior to the usage of ~~poor people~~ ~~minorities~~ those other people - and that feeling justifies itself.
>Thousands of people also go to Google and type in "microsoft", then click on one of the results, rather than just typing "microsoft.com" in the address bar. And they get along "just fine". Does that mean that's the way they should do it?
I program for a living and honestly this is usually how I navigate the internet. I would also highly recommend it for anyone, especially those who are less internet savvy. The odds of someone maliciously squatting a similar looking domain are too high for me to just blindly type in what I think is the correct URL. Obviously this is Iess of a concern with major companies like Microsoft who have the resources to track down offending websites, but I don't particularly want to compromise my computer by accidentally going to nicrosoft.com and getting my identity stolen when I try to buy something.
I don't use y'all in my dialect (we either use "you all" or "you guys". I can't figure out exactly what the distinction is, except that they're not interchangeable), but if you're looking for a way to measure it, y'all is one syllable and you all/you guys are both 2 syllables. Y'all is more efficient.
That being said, it's pointless trying to measure what language is better. If you understand it and nothing sounds wrong (for example, "might could" sounds completely incorrect to me, but it is grammatical in other dialects), it's correct. If you don't understand it or it immediately sounds wrong, it's not grammatical. There are no magic rules determining what is good grammar. Whatever native speakers speak is good grammar.
You sometimes hear Irish people saying things like 'I'm after putting it on the table' for 'I put it on the table', which is super 'inefficient' but I love it because of the way it positions the speaker in time, as though they're at an additional remove from their past self.
Your comment reminded me of this for some reason. Anyway, language is awesome and we appreciate it way more than prescriptivists. I wonder if we could convince them that we appreciate more units of beauty than them and they should therefore come over to our side. You know, empirically.
> > That's right, boys and girls, languages change because people make deliberate decisions to change the way they speak. That's how it works. Decisions.
>In a lot of cases, they do. In a lot of cases, they don't. Not sure what your point is.
#
>It is 100% possible for any given usage to be measurably better than another, and to pretend it's not possible is sticking one's head in the sand.
Bro, do you even linguistics?
>For a real larf
I wonder how they feel about not pronouncing /r/ in their words if they're so stuffy about they.
I'm going to surmise that they feel that not pronouncing /r/ is the unequivocally correct way to do it.
If you want to pick a fight, I only have so many hours in the day, so I'm doubtful. But on the off-chance you were actually curious behind that sarcastic italicization, I feel rhoticity is less ambiguous than non-. But even non- still pronounces it a little, usually. "Bear" and "beh" still mostly come out a little different from one another, to my ear.
You never really answered the comment about the second person pronoun.
If "they" as a singular has too much ambiguity, why is "you" ok? As it takes only plural agreement.
Do you consider "idea" /aɪdi.ə/ to be correct and "idear" /aɪdi.ɚ/ to be wrong?
Who's "they"? Did I have a mouse in my pocket?
I did pronounce the R in "larf". I have a lot of leeway there, given that it's explicitly made-up and I'm rhotic.
The subject of "they" is pretty clear from the context.
You appear to be giving them too much credit.
Probably. Though now they're sending me PM's to try and continue the argument.
I'm sorry.
I'm kind of honored to be honest. Someone was upset enough with what I said to continue the argument via PM.
It's one thing to have users argue with mods in modmail over issues (this happens with us in /r/badhistory), but this is quite different.
Ahaha now he's sending me PMs too. This is adorable.
That's at least three of us in this thread.
> Who's "they"? Did I have a mouse in my pocket?
Stop being deliberately obtuse, you clearly knew what they meant from the context. It's almost as if this definition of "they" is well-known and widespread. Hmm....
>>What makes it "wrong"?
>Because it's less useful/more cumbersome that way.
Um... what?
It's also less useful/more cumbersome to write 'less useful/more cumbersome' than it is just to pick one or the other but fortunately that doesn't bother him.
I like how you think useful and cumbersome are perfect antonyms. I have plenty of stuff around my house that's both useful and cumbersome.
I don't think they're 'perfect antonyms'.
I, too, measure the correctness of language by how much it weighs me down.
So brave
Edit: also, y'all is a kludge? lol idiot.
It’s escaped the USA. I heard a Canadian – born and raised, never been to the USA except for some shopping – use it naturally and unironically. It was a perfectly grammatical context too.
Soon the whole world will fall to the might of the Y’all Overlords.
(Disclaimer: I don’t have y’all in my dialect.)
[deleted]
There is no debate to be had here.
You're saying "Language would be better if it was the way I wanted it to be." You might as well say "The solar system would be nicer if Pluto orbited the sun more neatly."
It's beyond me how he thought his new shiny alt account wouldn't get banned as well.
They're persistent, that's for sure. I've gotten 5 pms from them now.
I'm having fun imagining how annoying it must be for someone with chronic last-word-itis to have their comments deleted.
He keeps trying! Gosh he is so angry. Somebody really needs to burp the baby.
I have always been taught that "they" cannot be used as a singular pronoun, so when the gender isn't known you say "he or she."
People have been using 'they' as a singular pronoun for a long time.
Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen have all used "they" or "their" in this way.
Well... I mean, I guess they're all pretty good. Y'know, if you like that sort of thing.
It's widely known Chaucer couldn't spell for a damn and had no facility with English. I mean, for crying out loud, the man uses "ax," consistently flips around consonants in simple words like "bird," and was apparently blissfully unaware that "orange" is a color so he relied on clumsy work arounds like "yellow-red," or "fox-colored."
And don't get me started on Shakespeare, whose facility with English was so poor you can hardly go two pages without finding a word he simply made up.
> And don't get me started on Shakespeare, whose facility with English was so poor you can hardly go two pages without finding a word he simply made up.
This is a very good point. Does this mean I can be absolved from the crime of "arguing from authority" since it's now clear that neither writer was an authority?
Argument from authority.
I don't think you understand what the fallacy of "argument from authority" actually is.
Argument from fallacy.
Authority from fallacy.
Argument ad bonhomie
But no authority from argument.
http://imgur.com/a/E9vbZ
Argument from tradition.
/u/Atario sits down at a formal dinner. He's prepared for this! His English teacher told him exactly what silverware to use and he's confident that he's a paragon of the mannered classes. When the soup is served, /u/Atario notices that it has oysters in it, and so he picks up the oyster fork and begins to eat.
But then he notices, wait - everyone else at the table is using a spoon to eat the soup. This sends /u/Atario into a fit of smug. ~Hah,~ he thinks, ~I'm the only one here who knows the correct way to do it.~ He brings this to the attention of the other people at the table. It has oysters, don't you know you should use the oyster fork?
Everyone else just looks confused, though. They tell /u/Atario that, actually, it's perfectly acceptable to eat soup with a spoon. People have been eating their soup with a spoon for hundreds of years, regardless of whether it has oysters in it or not. /u/Atario can use the fork if he wants, but he doesn't have to, and in fact some people might think he is behaving a little oddly.
/u/Atario doesn't disagree that people having been using spoons to eat any kind of soup for a long time, but he read about this thing called a "logical fallacy" on the internet once, and he thinks he knows the type of logical fallacy that applies here. Argument from tradition, he crows! Just because people have done it for a long time doesn't mean it's right. And so, feeling like he has successfully destroyed the other side's argument, the triumphant /u/Atario returns to eating his oyster soup with his oyster fork.
But ... the people at the table look at each other, confused by this response. It seems they have a question that they want to ask. One of them does.
"Wait, but then ... if it's not correct to use a spoon for oyster soup just because it's what people have done for hundreds of years, why is it correct to use an oyster fork? Where does that rule come from?"
Everyone but /u/Atario knows the answer to this question: you use an oyster fork for oysters because that's also how it's been done for a long time.
That straw you are grasping for, yeah, just let go.
Go back to speaking Proto-Indo-European, then, if you're so upset about all these nasty language changes.
I suggest you actually try to defend your own position rather than feebly attempting to discount others’ without actually knowing how.
They sent me a pm trying to continue the argument about measuring the usability of words in which they went straight for the "shouldn't we just smash all the words together then!?".
I felt like replying "reductio ad absurdum" to them and nothing else.
You mean the guy with the mouse in his pocket? Poor mousey...
I think it was a hamster, and I don't think it was inserted in his pocket.
They sent me one too. I just blocked them, I’m not interested in wasting my time with someone who’s too lazy to do their own reading.
ruh-roh, somebody call FALLACY MAN
> Argument from how language is actually used.
FTFY
That is commonly taught in school. Unfortunately, grammar as it is taught in school is at least 100 years behind the current scientific understanding. "He or she" is not wrong and is preferable in some contexts. But almost everyone uses "they" as a singular pronoun from time to time. It is not incorrect or ungrammatical to do so.
It's my understanding that grammar taught in school is for more formal use, like a job interview or something.
We teach them to speak and write formally, sure, but I don't think singular 'they' necessarily falls outside the range of 'formal' English; it's more a question of style, which is ultimately down to the individual.
I am a student of the law - grammatical "accuracy" is essential in the legal profession because the written style is extremely formal - judges are extremely wordy, traditional people - I once read a judgement in which the word "nay" was used - this judgement came not from the early 19th century, but rather 1970. It would be considered "incorrect" to use "they" as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun in a legal paper. Therefore, to be on the safe side, it would be wise to avoid it in academic writing. From my experience with middle-aged and below law professors, I am guessing that it probably would be considered by most academics (who have grown up in a highly prescriptivist education system) to be inconsistent with a proper formal academic style of writing - and if you don't know how to use the lingo you're presumed to not know any of the other associated academic skills either.
I don't know, law's a very narrow area of 'academic writing'. I'm teaching 11-18 year-olds; if any of them are going to get into law they'll learn about that kind of thing on their law course.
That's true, but it's also often a mixed bag of actual reasonable advice, weird hotbutton issues, and a the individual teacher's peeves and misconceptions. There's no consistent standard of grammar education for English teachers. Some are great; many are not.
Many English teachers aren't aware that there is a difference between "inappropriate in a formal essay" and "incorrect," for example, and they pass that on to the kids.
> Many English teachers aren't aware that there is a difference between "inappropriate in a formal essay" and "incorrect," for example, and they pass that on to the kids
I had one English teacher who made the difference clear, but she mentioned it as part of creative writing and not in normal day-to-day conversation or writing.
It's difficult to do within the limits of the curriculum and the time you have. Also, depending on the ability of your pupils you might just confuse or annoy them: "You speak English perfectly but you still have to shutup and listen to me explain how to conjugate the verb 'to be' for twenty minutes because our society insists on a set of arbitrary grammatical constructions in certain settings" is not a winning argument for a bunch of 14 year olds.
I think you're either underestimating the kids or overestimating the complexity of the concept.
"The way you speak with your friends and family is wrong and what I'm teaching you is right" isn't less complicated than "we are focusing on formal writing in this class, and some of the rules for formal writing are different." And, telling kids that their everyday speech is wrong - that they aren't good at their language - is a great way to undermine their confidence, alienate them, and reinforce existing social prejudices. Very young kids can take well to language instruction that is based on recognizing differences rather than recognizing "right" and "wrong." You might be interested in looking into the "multidialectal" approach, which has been used successfully in classes where most of the students speak a stigmatized dialect natively (so even MORE differences).
But also, no, I just don't agree that the reason that so many classrooms have poor English instruction is because there are limits in the curriculum and time. That's definitely part of the equation, but misinformed English teachers is also part of the problem. When they don't learn basic grammar beyond the collection of proscriptions that they learned in school themselves, they don't have the tools to understand or teach grammar well. As I said, some English teachers are great and I've met a few. But on the other hand, my classes are full of students who were taught nonsense in their English classes, I was taught nonsense, and I've encountered plenty of English teachers who believe nonsense. So, I can't believe that lack of education of English teachers isn't a problem also.
> When they don't learn basic grammar beyond the collection of proscriptions that they learned in school themselves, they don't have the tools to understand or teach grammar well.
I think part of the problem is that so many people think that grammar means "the formal rules of writing that I learned in school", and not "the structure of how language works".
>I think part of the problem is that so many people think that grammar means "the formal rules of writing that I learned in school", and not "the structure of how language works".
But there's also how many people lack the ability to critically evaluate what they were taught as formal rules beyond just their structure: What is the rule? Is the rule commonly followed? Is it valuable for my students to know?
Put it all together and you end up with English teachers who are convinced that a passive sentence is always inferior to an active one, but who aren't able to identify passives reliably. I had one of those.
If it's a rule you learned, it must be right. No consulting of evidence necessary.
This is why as a tutor I specifically teach all of my kids about code-switching and different in registers. Down to having them write sentences in different registers to internalise the rules of each of them. To the point where I have 5th and 6th graders using who/whom and subjunctives in the appropriate way in the right context.
No doubt some teachers talk nonsense; I read about a school in England recently that had 'banned "slang"' and this ban included 'starting a sentence with "Basically"', which is a common habit of kids in my part of the country.
Despite teachers and their nonsense, it's amazing how imaginative kids will be when trying to get out of work or undermine the system in any way they can. There are some kids I've taught who, if I told them slang was fine to use in any given context, I'd spend the rest of my year with them saying 'But sir, didn't you say slang was acceptable in certain situations? You said I spoke English perfectly so how come you're correcting my grammar?' That's what I meant when I said I didn't have the time to properly explain grammar as a linguist sees it - too many arguments.
I'm sorry if that all seems very cynical. For the record, my approach is usually to ask the kids if they speak the same way to their parents as they do to their friends and when the majority agree that they don't I hold up their essays and say 'This is the exact same thing. If you can learn to speak differently to your mates, you can learn to write differently to me'.
That makes sense. One of my English teachers in school told us never to pronounce "metaphor" as "meta-four", and to say "I've got", not "I got".
How else can you pronounce metaphor?
I don't really feel good about this. This is what a downvote brigade looks like.
I'm curious as to why you think the title of this is functionally any different from "A user in TIL decrees that the singular they is wrong", especially since the link goes to the same comment?
I don't think it's any different.
I probably shouldn't have said anything since I'm not a regular here, I just saw that poor dude getting walloped with linguistics and it didn't really seem very constructive.
I don't think his downvotes were coming from badlinguistics. When I checked the thread the total number of votes he had were fairly consistent with what other commenters in the thread had--just in the negative rather than the positive.
That's good to know. I easily could have misread the situation.
Have people been doing this? They shouldn't, if they do. I never do.
I still maintain that if people are going to get butthurt about being downvoted, they shouldn't participate in a website that explicitly gives its users that option.
Yeah. I don't participate in this sub enough to feel like I have a say in it, but I think a rule against usernames in titles would be a nice touch.
Can you explain the reasoning why?
Whether the username is in the title or not, the link is the same. If people are going to downvote it's because of what the user is saying and they don't care enough to follow our rules, not because the username is right in the title.
It's a show of intent more than a hard preventative, really. Sort of like adding "np." to URLs.
It might not actually decrease downvotes for any given link, but avoiding headlines that call out specific users would help shift the implied meaning of a submission to "look at this dumb statement" rather than "look at this dumb asshole".
I don't see a problem with it. I've always like /r/badphilosophy's style over that of, say, /r/badhistory. Let's let /r/badlinguistics be the nice middle ground where we are both sarcastic dickheads and also well-informed linguists.
> I've always like /r/badphilosophy's style over that of, say, /r/badhistory
FIGHT!!!
I don't have a problem with usernames in titles myself, but this is a fair point. However, keep in mind we don't require np. links either.
> would help shift the implied meaning of a submission to "look at this dumb statement" rather than "look at this dumb asshole".
That's a good point. Makes it less of a personal attack on an individual.