I hear a lot of grammatically-inclined people constantly bemoaning the use of singular “they”. Though there are many grammar scholars who say that singular “they” is a legitimate use of the word, and has been used in such a way throughout the history of the language and by many respected writers, most of the people debating grammar on the internet aren’t grammar scholars and instead argue about what they learned about grammar in third grade because everything they learned in elementary school was 100% the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
I dislike people who put grammar in front of people’s feelings. Who flat out refuse to use singular they as a gender neutral pronoun because of some arbitrary and erroneous rule of a language which frequently breaks all of its rules. “I before E except after C”? But there are so many words that break that rule. Why do you have such a problem with singular they?
The short of it is that they’re often looking for excuses not to go beyond “he” and “she”. If you can deny someone’s request to be called “they” with some “rules” that are out of your hands, then you don’t have to be a jerk, you’re just following rules. The same way some opponents of same sex marriage object to it purely because the dictionary definition of it is between a man and a woman, and they’re terrified of changing the dictionary, as if it were a holy book in itself. In a way, it is. If you control a language, you control what can be said. If you don’t have a word for something, it is hard to talk about it, and keeping singular “they” from happening is a way of trying to keep gender neutral people from happening.
English is not a dead language. It is very much alive, constantly changing and evolving. New words are added to the dictionary every year. We all use slang words regardless of whether they’re in the dictionary or not. Language works for us; we do not bend over backwards for our language. If we don’t know a word that fits what we want to say, we make one up. Heck, there might be a perfectly good word that fits what we want to say, but we make a new one up just for the fun of it.
People joke about being self-proclaimed “grammar-Nazis”, but it’s often a much more fitting title than they realize. Because they are attempting to control people’s behavior to maintain a system that they like, despite it not being relevant to other people.
If you love the English language so much, then you must love how it changes, because change is one of the fundamentals of the language. To halt that would kill it. It would become irrelevant. So just go with it. Let “fetch” happen. And by “fetch”, I mean “singular they”.
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Making "fetch" happen
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