A cultural blog with Kyrie O'Connor

He, she, it – the worst failure of modern English


Possibly the most irritating feature of modern-day English is the lack of a gender-neutral singular pronoun in situations where “it” simply will not do.

No, that’s not an effete thing to say. If you like sentences such as “Each child should do what they want,” you have an ear of tin.

Most of us fogeys were taught as children that the default was to the masculine, as in “Each child should do what he wants.” That doesn’t work for most of us, nor does “he or she.” or “s/he.”

There are a couple of work-arounds, such as pluraling the whole sentence: “Children should do what they want.”

Slate has a podcast discussion of this. (Couple of bad words in there.) The speakers give the issue an interesting sociological/linguistic spin. (I didn’t know that most English nouns used to be masculine.)

And of course there’s the stilted-sounding “one”: “If one is a child, one should do what one wants.”

So does “they” drive you nuts? Do you buy the argument that it can be a singular?

Categories: language
Kyrie O'Connor

15 Responses

  1. JohnD says:


    One certainly does; a better phrasing is “Each child should do as they like”. 8-)

    Seriously, English is by no means unique in lacking a “I don’t know what the person’s gender is so I’ll use a neutral one” pronoun. We American speakers of English merely appear to be unique in caring (or at least appearing to care) about the supposed lack. This has given rise to such bastard verbiage as “hirs” and “s/he”.

    To fill this inelegant gap, I hereby propose that we use the word “nu” for the gender-neutral equivalent of “he” or “she”, with “nus” subbing for “his” or “hers”, and “num” for “him” or “her”. Having trademarked “nu”, I expect a payment of $.000001 each time it is used. I should be a gazillionaire by the end of the week.

  2. ken says:

    Yes, it drives me nuts, and I almost always find a way to avoid it, but every now and then I succumb, when there’s nothing else that sounds right. (Sometimes I just go with “she” to provoke a reaction.) In my kind of bureacratic writing, the “they” problem is often paired with the “staff” problem: “All staff are fully trained…” — which spell-check thinks should be “All staff is”…

  3. JCarreon says:

    Why, exactly, doesn’t that work for “most of us”? There had to be some grammatical rules, so I would think we could find more important things to nitpick about.

    Assuming that everything now has to be gender neutral so we don’t offend any/everyone, why isn’t “every child should do as it wants” acceptable?

  4. Paul says:

    I think the idea that all children should do what they like is at the heart of many of the problems in our society today.

    No one else pointed that out, so I felt I should step up and do so.

  5. Paul Norman says:

    I fail to understand why we do not just adopt “it” as the universal gender neutral pronoun, since “he” can no longer be used for an unspecified person. Why is it icky to apply the the same pronoun to a person that we apply to a tree or a brick? If we would just bite the bullet and start using “it” we would get used to it.

  6. AggieBill says:

    Yes, it bothers me a lot, but then I’m a copy editor so it comes with the job. Unless it’s in a direct quote, I usually either reword it or (if it isn’t crucial to the story) delete it. Away from work, I just try to avoid sentences like that.

  7. Anne says:

    “They” as a singular proponoun drives me so bonkers that I recently had a bad dream about it. But my job involves grammar (which I hesitate to disclose because I’ve probably made a mistake in this comment).

  8. AggieBill says:

    One other thing: That photo from “Them” reminded me that almost every night as I head to the Chronicle garage, the pedestrian alarm across Prairie in the Calpine Building (or whatever it’s called now) goes off when a car leaves its garage, and it sounds EXACTLY like the giant ants from that great old ’50s sci-fi classic. Eerie.

  9. Andy W. says:

    Yes. Drives me nuts. Every Facebook application says something like, “John has sold their sheep.” For this we let Mark Zuckerberg make $19 billion?

  10. cosmo says:

    Still trying to figure out who “they” are in “You know what they say…..”

  11. No says:

    It is correct grammar and it works just fine.