Many years ago, my elementary school teachers taught that a pronoun must match its antecedent – the noun to which it refers – in number, gender, and person. In “John read that rule from his book,” the pronoun “his” is singular, masculine, and third-person. That’s straight-up grammar.
Yet every week I read online writers who employ the plural “they” to refer to a singular person. Sometimes sloppy writing or ignorance is the cause of this misuse. An example: “Someone in Congress needs to address the skyrocketing national debt, and they need to do it immediately.” Someone is a singular noun and demands a singular pronoun. This mistake is easily corrected, however, by changing “someone” to “some members.”
On other occasions, the writer clearly intends this erroneous usage, notably in the use of the pronouns “they” and “their.” In her recent Substack essay, “Exploring the Fruit of Gentleness,” Freda Donnelly included a paragraph about an intern she’d taken under her wing who had botched an assignment. Here is a sampling of that paragraph:
The intern had trusted me with personal things, as I’d become a mentor of sorts to them since I was a manager at this organization. I knew they had reason to be distracted. However, I didn’t want to even appear to be throwing this back at them … I factually and straightforwardly shared my findings with them and inquired as to what happened. They didn’t know and were frazzled to find out that it was incorrect.
Two sentences later, Donnelly lets slips this third-person plural mask when she writes, “More importantly than that, I didn’t want to take away her dignity, especially at a vulnerable time, nor did I sour her experience.”
With that exposure of the intern’s gender, some questions arise. First, why was Donnelly using “they,” “them,” and “their” in the first place? Was she trying to conceal the intern’s identity to avoid bringing shame to her, but then forgot to continue the charade? Or had the intern, fuzzy on the question of gender, asked to be addressed in the third-person plural? In either case, Donnelly’s reversion to the correct pronouns at the end of the paragraph indicates she could only keep up the pretense for so long before instinct and reason took the helm.
Recently, I interviewed an entertainment planner for a large brewery in Asheville, N.C. On her bio she listed her “preferred pronouns” as “they/them.” In her case, the motive was clear. She wished to march under the whimsical banner of transgenderism and sexual fluidity.
This grammatical hocus-pocus may seem harmless, but there are ramifications. If a new acquaintance, Allen, tells me he prefers to be addressed with the pronoun they, as in “Allen’s gone to the ball game. They were really excited,” then I cannot help but see Allen as possessed of multiple personalities or Dissociative Identity Disorder. I’m left wondering what other characters lie tangled up inside him.
Furthermore, this buffet of pronouns will confuse readers. Here’s a sample of the mess this can create:
“On his way home from work, Richard picked up the clementines their wife wanted. When they got home, they squeezed them and declared them perfect. Later that evening, while watching television, they ate two oranges while they sipped a beer and munched on crackers.”
Here’s the translation:
“On his way home from work, Richard picked up the clementines his wife wanted. When he got home, she squeezed them and declared them perfect. Later that evening, while watching television, she ate two oranges while he sipped a beer and munched on crackers.”
Preferred pronouns are just one more example of the political and cultural obfuscations of our language. Not only are these twisted constructions grammatically incorrect and jarring, they also defy common sense and the laws of nature and science.
It’s time we closed the curtain on this wrongheaded notion and moved on.
—
The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image Credit: Flickr-gdsteam, CC BY 2.0
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