weekend diversion / into the weeds of grammar with “they” and “he or she”

“Psycho Babble”! (gotta love that)
I may not always pay as much attention as I should to grammar, but I have often rewritten sentences to avoid using “he or she” with a single generic referent. (If you think that my sensitivity is mere PC and that I should just use “he” all the time, try using just “she” all the time for a while before using PC as a slur.)  Sometimes the result is an awkward construct, but I have been convinced that using “they” in a singular context is just wrong.

Interesting piece in The American Scholar, The Grammarian Was a He (under the heading Psycho Babble!), asserts that “they” was common usage until about 200 years ago, the singular plural notwithstanding. I get it that grammar “rules”, like all rules probably, are convention — what the people agree on. Whether “the people” are the masses, or the elites pushing the masses is a question for another day.

O O O Oklahoma, where the wind goes rushing down the plain
Fans of great American musicals will be familiar with a modern example of the rules changing. It always struck me that the corn in the song (in the movie version, at least) was as high as “a elephant’s eye” instead of “an elephant’s eye”. Each fits in the meter equally, yet the usage is “a”. I assume that is because “a” was correct when it was written. Rules change. Jessica Love in The American Scholar cites

Ann Bodine[, who] argues in her 1975 article “Androcentrism in Prescriptive Grammar,” [that] prior to the 19th century, “they” was commonly—and uncontroversially—used as a generic singular pronoun. Grammarians were the ones who inserted the generic “he” into English about 200 years ago in an effort to improve the language.

One of Love’s commenters adds additional examples from the second half of the 19th century, taken from the on-line Oxford English Dictionary.

Interesting facts, which might cause me to rethink my approach. “They” seems to be common today, at least in popular usage. To my ear it sounds wrong, but maybe it is my ear that needs a retuning.

(No, I do not read The American Scholar, even irregularly; the h/t goes to Andrew Sullivan.)

© Sandy Mattingly 2012