Something I would really like to see here is use of gender-specific pronoun "he" or "she" instead of "they". Yes, the language has changed so that "they" is acceptable as gender-neutral singular, but it's still regularly jarring, and when the information is or can conveniently be there (you can very easily collect it—male, female or unspecified) it makes it much more pleasant to read.
Exactly. Educated English writers, including Shakespeare, have been using "they" as a gender-neutral third-person pronoun since Middle English. I believe there's even evidence of this in Old English.
It's only been in the past century that proscriptionist grammarians have dreamed up this pedantic rule and sought to eliminate English's sole gender-neutral singular pronoun. But since educated writers and common folk alike have been using "they" as a singular pronoun for centuries before these neo-grammarians dreamed up their rule, it's a hopeless and utterly useless quest.
The prescriptivist intervention wasn't in the past century, though, it was in the 18th. It's been traced to a single grammatical treatise—I forget the name but can look it up if there's interest—which argued for singular "he" as the standard. Ironically, the book was written by a woman—how's that for troll fodder?
Yes, you're right. I hesitated when I wrote "last century", since I had vague memories of the neo-classicists who were leading the charge for his/her exclusively, since they believed it more closely reflected pure Latin usage -- which they sought to emulate in English. So it doesn't surprise me that it goes back to the 18th century.
Ironically, most of the people I know who now advocate for the gender-neutral third-person singular "they", and from whom I learned its history, have classical training to some degree or another.
Thanks for the correction -- I'll have to try and track down that book.
The irony is considerable. Not only was the originator of generic "he" a woman, she was a successful woman entrepreneur when such a thing was unheard of. What's more, her book was known for arguing against the incursion of Latin rules into English grammar—which is what generic "he" was.
Wow, I'd never heard of Ann Fisher. And the fact she was arguing against Latin goes against all the conventional wisdom I've heard about the whole he vs they push. Very interesting.
Also, I've bookmarked that NY Times piece for future use when someone on the Internet berates me for using third-person singular "they" or "their".
It's probably just be the circles you travel in, but to me it wasn't jarring whatsoever. (I use the singular they in any case when I'm referring to someone whose gender I don't know/a hypothetical person where gender doesn't come into it, or if that's what they want me to use!)
Do you know how we would go about doing it? (That's not a snarky Q - I genuinely don't know!). I too would love to but I'm unsure as to how to reliably do it - and in the mean time gender-neutral was a safer bet.
You could tie it in with letting the user specify the name to display; changing away from using Twitter handles is probably not a bad thing anyway. Thus you could have as part of the sign-up process:
1. Call me _________
2. Refer to me as
( ) male ("he")
( ) female ("she")
(x) gender-neutral or plural ("they")
( ) actually, we're a group ("they")
For e.g. Twitter sign-up, you'd auto-fill the first with their username and the second with gender-neutral.
That does sound rather awkward and could hopefully be improved upon. (I added the final option as it occurred to me businesses could use this.)
I agree that the concept of displaying "he" or "she" would indeed be an improvement, but I feel as though the only way to get over the awkwardness of the form questions you defined would be to go through some kind of "profile builder".
This obviously takes the app to a new place - now talking about some sort of profile system - this would obviously be a huge feature to add with a load of other implications.
