I have spent a good bit of my life trying to learn how to write well. Writing well, I think, is one part practice (those 10,000 hours), one part reading other writers (good ones), and one part the study of fundamentals (grammar and craft). There may be other elements—or we might renumber the parts—but I can’t think of them right now.

That bit about the fundamentals (it’s good grammar, but it’s more than that; see Strunk and White) may surprise you, but I honestly believe they will always stand you in good stead. And while I like to think I’m not rigid about fundamentals—I’m the first person to remind the Change Resistant that language is a living, breathing thing—I do think one should be cautious when departing from them.

Which means sometimes things need to be reconsidered. The Chicago Manual of Style periodically issues a new edition precisely for this reason. Style changes. So does grammar and spelling. Open compounds become closed. Words are added or fall out of favor; they take on new definitions that become standard usage. And so on. I know these things.

So why can’t I get behind the singular they? You know how I feel about it. Cue Bonnie Raitt singing the fabulous “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin:

’Cause I can’t make you love me if you don’t
You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t …

And I’m not the only one who feels this way. But when I posted this article on Facebook awhile back, one of my really smart friends commented, “What is convenient, what is widespread, what is unambiguous, will become the preferred usage eventually. Why fight it? But I’m a progressive in all matters, even language.” And in the interesting way the universe aligns itself, that same week I saw a tweet about a new post on this subject from Stan Carey, who writes the fantastic Sentence first blog.

I read the post, I read the links in the post, and I felt … well, I felt something. 🙂 I respect Carey a lot. He makes good sense.

It presupposes … that there is a “single language of truth”, absolutely harmonious forever … [Still,] words can never be so impeccably created, chosen and arranged as to constitute a “single language of truth”; they only ever manage an approximation or a corruption of it. But we do our best, and patterns and principles emerge and congregate on common and generally sound conventions. Such as singular they.

Carey also pointed readers to this post, from editor John McIntyre at the venerable Baltimore Sun, who writes a wonderful blog for them called You Don’t Say.

What we want in English is sometimes called an epicene pronoun. That is … we want a non-gender-specific pronoun to refer back to a non-gender-specific antecedent. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage points out, we have just such a pronoun: they. It is attested to by a number of citations in MWDEU: “The Pardoner’s Prologue” in the Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare, Swift, Byron, Thackeray, Austen, Orwell, Auden. … I am not a stickler (though I was a particularly prissy and annoying one in my hot-blooded youth). Neither am I an enthusiast who goes dancing with every neologism that comes down the pike. I am an editor, charged with making informed judgments about what is appropriate for subject, author, publication, occasion, and audience.

It all makes sense, it does. And I don’t want to be known as a cranky, inflexible grammarian. But singular they still makes me cringe a little. And the fact that a lot of people use it now—and that writers used it three, four, five hundred years ago—doesn’t mean the standard practices I learned and that are still being taught are wrong, exactly. It just means those standard practices are gradually morphing (yet again).

To me it still looks like inelegant writing, like unlearned writing. (And speaking: last week’s People magazine had an article about Daniel Day-Lewis that interviewed both the actor and his current producer. The latter’s quote used the singular they, even though he was clearly referring to Daniel Day-Lewis; meanwhile, Day-Lewis’s quote effortlessly matched pronoun to antecedent the way I would have done. I’m not sure what this says, exactly, but it jumped off the page at me.)

As an editor, I know there are workarounds. Sentences can be recast if one finds oneself in an awkward he-or-she situation. That’s what I’ve done in the past. Stan Carey says, “Peeves about singular they are unsupported by historical and present usage and unsupportable by appeal to grammar or logic. You don’t have to use it,* but resistance invites unnatural awkwardness and unnecessary exclusion. Why not get on board with it?”

Well … partly because going along with the crowd isn’t a good enough reason for me. I understand that’s the direction we’re heading, and I fully recognize no one’s looking for my approval on this issue. 🙂 But I haven’t been thinking of my objection to singular they as a peeve, frankly.

However … I’m walking away from the fight.

If I’m editing your manuscript, I’ll still want to make the prose as graceful as possible and that will include keeping a sharp eye on pronouns, even the singular they. We’ll take edits on a case-by-case basis; I’ll try to be more flexible if you insist on using it. You can’t make me like it; I can’t make myself like it. But I’ll keep my cringing to myself. 🙂

* (Emphasis mine.)

Tweet: Singular they: You can’t make me like it; I can’t make myself like it. I’ve tried.
Tweet: I don’t want to be cranky. But singular they still makes me cringe a little.

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