They is Singular!

As an English teacher, I’m frustrated…

this isn’t going where you think…

by all the people who use “he” to mean “people,” and then justify it by recourse to The White God of Grammar. For them, New Feminist offers the following excerpt from Steven Pinker’s Language Instinct, which just can’t get enough exposure:

The next time you get corrected for this sin, ask Mr. Smartypants how you should fix the following:

Mary saw everyone before John noticed them.

Now watch him squirm as he mulls over the downright unintelligible “improvement,” Mary saw everyone before John noticed him.

The logical point that you, Holden Caulfield, and everyone but the language mavens intuitively grasp is that everyone and they are not an “antecedent” and a “pronoun” referring to the same person in the world, which would force them to agree in number. They are a “quantifier” and a “bound variable,” a different logical relationship. Everyone returned to their seats means “For all X, X returned to X’s seat.” The “X” does not refer to any particular person or group of people; it is simply a placeholder that keeps track of the roles that players play across different relationships. In this case, the X that comes back to a seat is the same X that owns the seat that X comes back to. The their there does not, in fact, have plural number, because it refers neither to one thing nor to many things; it does not refer at all. The same goes for the hypothetical caller: there may be one, there may be none, or the phone might ring off the hook with would-be suitors; all that matters is that every time there is a caller, if there is a caller, that caller, and not someone else, should be put off.

On logical grounds, then, variables are not the same thing as the more familiar “referential” pronouns that trigger number agreement (he meaning some particular guy, they meaning some particular bunch of guys). Some languages are considerate and offer their speakers different words for referential pronouns and for variables. But English is stingy: a referential pronoun must be drafted into service to lend its name when a speaker needs to use a variable. Since these are not real referential pronouns but only homonyms of them, there is no reason that the vernacular decision to borrow they, their, them for the task is any worse than the prescriptivists’ recommendation of he, him, his. Indeed, they has the advantage of embracing both sexes and feeling right in a wider variety of sentences.

Words can be both singular and plural without changing form – witness sheep and fish. “They” was once indisputably one of those words, until the first grammar book writers decided to make “he” the pronoun of choice for explicitly political reasons.

If only people who – rightly – respected grammar also respected the history of grammar.