“Just who does they think they is?” That’s the question that raced through the language snob community late last month. Maybe not phrased in those exact words.
We was—no, we were—reacting to a bit of shoptalk from the editors of The Associated Press Stylebook. The importance and influence of The AP Stylebook extend far beyond the wire service’s own wordslingers. It is one of the last, widely cited arbiters of what’s good English and what ain’t, now that most traditional style books, such as The Elements of Style and Fowler’s Modern English Usage, have been ruled out of court by our cutting-edge grammarians as much too bossy.
Revisions are made to the stylebook every year, and now, with a digital edition, even oftener than that, allowing it to absorb the innovations of our lovely, ever-living language. The big news in this year’s revision involved pronouns. There are people who get very hot over the subject of pronouns, and the editors of the stylebook weigh their views carefully when the issue is raised.
The 2016 edition, like every edition before it, held to a set of pronoun rules that is centuries old, tracing back to the early days of Middle English. Like most rules, they were commonly violated, sometimes through carelessness, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by reckless tradesmen who should know better (me).
Still, The AP Stylebook has been unyielding, and the 2016 edition asserted its judgments on pronouns with rare and admirable vigor. The distinction between “every one and everyone” was elegantly drawn. You should use “two words when it means each individual item: Every one of the clues was worthless.” It should appear as “one word when used as a pronoun meaning all persons: Everyone wants his life to be happy.”
The important point, for our present purposes, is that the 2016 stylebook considered everyone, whether one word or two, to be singular. Everyone knows this to be true; after all, we don’t say “everyone know this to be true.” For that reason it requires a singular pronoun, his. In such contexts his has traditionally been taken as a gender-neutral pronoun encompassing both men and women. In Everyone wants his life to be happy, for example, the subject everyone, which here serves as the antecedent, must agree with the verb wants, and both must agree with the pronoun his.
And when you’re dealing with plural words, things work the same way.
“Their,” said the old stylebook, “is a plural possessive pronoun and must agree in number with the antecedent.”
Then it offered a pair of examples to illustrate the point. “Wrong: Everyone raised their hands. Right: They raised their hands.”
Well, that was then, and this is now. Who knew we would ever have reason to miss the year 2016? We’re only four months into 2017, and the editors of the stylebook have already rendered last year’s edition obsolete, a token of a vanished age—at least when it comes to the plural pronoun, which isn’t plural anymore.
In the new edition, that muscular, unambiguous sentence cited above (“Their is a plural possessive pronoun and must agree in number with the antecedent”) has been stricken from the stylebook. Now the sentence, the rule itself, has disappeared—gone, vanished, poof, like those Communist functionaries who’d get scrubbed from official photographs when they got crossways with Stalin.
In its place, the editors have concocted this: “In most cases, a plural pronoun should agree in number with the antecedent: The children love the books their uncle gave them. They/them/their is acceptable in limited cases as a singular and-or gender-neutral pronoun, when alternative wording is overly awkward or clumsy.”
They offered two reasons for their decision. We will take them in order.
First: The editors, in a press release, said they were merely recognizing “that the spoken language uses they as singular.” In truth, the language doesn’t use anything. What they meant was lots and lots of American English-speakers, probably a majority, use they as singular—freely, wantonly, unrestrained by fear of contradiction. The student needs to improve their grade if they want to graduate. So promiscuous has the singular they become that serious discussions are now had over which of these horrors is preferable: The student hurt themself or The student hurt theirself.
Here the stylebook editors find themselves on a battlefield of the familiar, endless, and deceptively important war between prescriptivists and descriptivists. In practice, prescriptivists favor traditional rules of usage and grammar, while descriptivists, in their more unguarded moments, seem to disfavor the very idea of rules. At best, when descriptivists refer to rules at all, it is to discredit them or dismantle them, on the grounds that no one is following them anyway. Thus the distinction, for example, between lie and lay, which so few English speakers recognize or observe, is discarded as obsolete for precisely that reason. The great copy editor Theodore Bernstein of the New York Times—yes, there are copy editors worthy to be called great!—defined descriptivism as “the odd belief that if a crime is committed often enough it should become legal.”
A stylebook like the AP’s is by nature prescriptivist. It settles disputes by laying down the law; the distinction between lay and lie continues to shine forth from its pages like a beacon of all that is good and true. But when the editors approve the singular they on the grounds that it’s widely used, they strike a blow for the descriptivists—although, as we’ll see, descriptivists often have trouble taking yes for an answer.
On its face the dispute looks like a contest between free-thinking democrats, champions of the common folk, and judgmental, authoritarian prigs. Any right-thinker will immediately know which side they should take. Nowadays it’s the descriptivists who defend the status quo—descriptivism is the reigning orthodoxy among the highest-ranking lexicographers and grammarians in publishing and the universities—and it’s the contrarians who find themselves defending tradition. But the dispute is a little subtler than that.
Scratch a prescriptivist, then scratch him again, and you will find a few descriptivist sympathies rolling around in there somewhere. Even the stuffiest prescriptivist knows that a language is an organic creation, needing to grow and change, open to freshets of innovation from whatever direction. The real difference is that while the descriptivist approves whatever new practice is coming from vox populi, the prescriptivist wants the language’s growth and change to be in the direction of simplicity and clarity, away from pretense and obfuscation. It’s hard to argue that confusing lay for lie, or the plural for the singular, is a move toward greater clarity.
In the same way, descriptivists, like their progressive brethren in politics and elsewhere, can sometimes be very prescriptive. They render thunderous judgments from which there is no appeal, with a vehemence that might make a prescriptivist blush. It’s a mistake to call them “relativists,” as some prescriptivists disparagingly do. Their anathemas are absolute. The linguist Geoffrey Pullum, a short-fused descriptivist and author of A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar, calls the insistence that “they” have a plural antecedent “an old chestnut” and “a familiar prejudice.” He thus invokes two things, “old” and “prejudiced,” that no one wants to be.
Consider, he says, a sentence like No one ever thinks they are personally responsible. To a prescriptivist the error is obvious, even if everyone commits it now and then—or even, in the case of most people, constantly. (Descriptivists like to argue that a rule is invalid if Jane Austen, Shakespeare, or some other master broke it once upon a time. This is the strangest argument from authority ever heard of: If Shakespeare did it, it cannot be a mistake.) The sentence, the prescriptivist says, is literally incoherent because it’s internally contradictory. The first verb (thinks) indicates a singular subject, and then, just a few words down, the next verb (are) indicates a plural subject, even though it’s the same subject fore and aft. Somewhere between the start of the sentence and its end, the singular suddenly had twins or triplets.
The incoherence is nicely, if unintentionally, expressed in the AP press release: “When ‘they’ is singular it takes a plural verb.” The singular, in other words, is plural, except when it’s singular. Nevertheless, Pullum says, “Such sentences are fully natural and acceptable.” Like some prescriptivists, he uses the tone of the papal bull, making a flat declaration of what is “acceptable.” And what is unacceptable: “Calling them incorrect,” he writes, “is delusional.” Look who’s getting judgmental all of a sudden.
The long march to approval of the singular they began in modern feminism. Activists rejected the idea that he could be used as a gender-neutral pronoun without implying an anti-woman bias. That he had been used to mean “he or she” for many centuries only confirmed the feminist argument, feminists said; the gender-neutral he was a tool of oppression. For reasons of cultural politics, then, enlightened persons began, rather ostentatiously, to use he or she where the gender neutral he had once been used. It wasn’t long before good writers and editors began noticing the new construction was unwieldy and inelegant, especially with frequent repetition. The next idea was to randomly alternate between he and she as the gender-neutral pronoun, sometimes in the same paragraph. Even the descriptivist writer Henry Hitchings found this usage to be “arch.” Stuck in a cul de sac of their own making, descriptivists still insist there’s no going back to he. So they it is—an excellent example of how even the most well-meaning reforms can force people to talk balls.
I mentioned that the AP editors cited two reasons for their (halfhearted) endorsement of the singular they. The first, even with its progressive overtones, might be called the descriptivist cave-in. The second cave-in is to cultural politics. “We also recognize,” the press release said, “the need for a pronoun for people who don’t identify as a he or a she.”
Even friendly demographers put the percentage of transgendered persons at less than one-half of 1 percent of the American population. Among that .4 percent, people who think they are neither male nor female constitute a vanishingly small portion. Even so, they have become an enthusiasm of young journalists, who have been trained to assume that some shocking and inhumane form of discrimination is always being committed out there in the country at large. The “non-binary” make a fine object for their rescue efforts. The stylebook could scarcely accommodate the cause without a pronoun to go with it. And so they has to be singular.
The change in the stylebook hasn’t been enough to satisfy some activists or reporters. (If you aren’t satisfied with either masculinity or femininity, you are by definition hard to please.) The news service of the Poynter Institute, the trade group of establishment journalism, warmly endorsed the stylebook change. But its story also quoted Tiffany Stevens, a reporter for the Roanoke Times, who “is non-binary and uses the singular ‘they’ pronoun.” While welcoming this “small” step on the part of the AP, Stevens complained that the stylebook didn’t go far enough. It still left room for people to think that the singular they was grammatically incorrect. The Poynter story continues:
You see what they did there.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
