Considering the Singular "They"

Sometimes it's hard to be someone who learned all their grammar in the 1950's. My initial reaction to use of they for a gender fluid person was that of an English teacher from the last century: “They can’t do that!”

But the more I read and the more I considered the very real case of those born somewhere in the middle of the spectrum that is gender, the more I began to accept this jarring usage, albeit while gritting my teeth a bit.

Recently, in editing one of the submissions for my class, I ran into a paragraph where a tarot reader is explaining the card for The Mage and says of the figure on the card ‘They’re pointing up with one hand…” As I was prepared to correct that they, I noticed that the writer had described the mage as androgynous. Aha! I pulled back my electronic red pencil, feeling inordinately proud of myself for having made this shift.

I refuse to be like the folks who still cling to the two spaces after a period or never split an infinitive despite the change in most modern style books. As long as I’m being paid for editing, I owe it to the writers to stay up to date and aware of current usage.

But I have found myself wishing there were a gender neutral pronoun so that they would continue to be plural forever.

Then I realized–we’ve been using they to refer to a single person for years--in cases where the gender is unknown. As in:

 Someone left a note on my car

Who was it?

They didn’t sign it

Or look back at that first sentence. 'Someone who learned all their grammar..."

 I'm that someone and I know my gender, yet I didn't write her.

Weird.

For the Grammar Nerds Among Us

A look at the book cover will give you a hint of the light-hearted (oops,  make that lighthearted) nature of this quite serious guide to usage and style.  I dashed through it -- enjoying every quirky footnote and each off the wall parenthetical expression -- and, coincidentally, learning a great deal about this respected copy editor's approach to our changing language.

The book is bursting with information on punctuation, grammar, word usage (toe or tow the line? blond or blonde?), and even the correct spelling of troublesome proper nouns. "Nikita Khrushchev- Soviet shoe-banger. You'd think that people would always look up a tricky name like Khrushchev. You'd be wrong."

I've always recommended Strunk & White's Elements of Style to my students but I'm going to have to add this to my list. It's an up-to-date and much expanded take on the same subject. 

Anyone (well, not anyone -- the book deals with American usage) who hopes to write for publication would do well to read Dreyer. And anyone with a touch of the grammar nerd in them (yes, them is correct now, replacing the unlovely him or her or the patriarchal he) would probably chortle their (also correct) way through this Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.

As Amy Bloom says in her enthusiastic blurb, "If Oscar Wilde had wanted to be helpful as well as brilliant, if E. B. White and Noel Coward had had a wonderful little boy who grew up to cherish and model clarity, the result would be Benjamin Dreyer and his frankly perfect book."

The downside of all this knowledge is to make me painfully aware of my own shortcomings. For example, the name Noel in the above paragraph (and this one too, drat it) should have a diaeresis (two little dots -- called an umlaut in Germanic languages but properly a diaeresis* in English) above the e. I haven't a clue as to how to make that happen in Blogger. 

But really, this is a terrific, useful, and most entertaining book. Highly recommended!

*There are other spellings -- Spellcheck doesn't like this one but it's the one Dreyer uses so there you go.