We need the singular ‘they’ and ears will 'pop'

Given impetus by the just move to allow people to flex gender-related terms, the pressure to develop a gender neutral but animate pronoun (because 'it' seems to denigrate personhood), I reckon that 'They' will continue to widen its usage. In this article at Aeon we read as an example, the following sentence: "Carey makes themself coffee every morning". Clearly to the author this sounds mangled. I was interested to note that for me it sounded okay. I think in my case because I don't know from the name what gender should be assumed for the subject and so as the rule in colloquial English is that singular 'they' is used when there is some doubt about the identity of the referred-to person, then doubt about gender, for me, allows the selection of 'they'.

The second part of the title of the article: 'it won't seem wrong for long' is right. The rules of grammar are not set in stone, they are not pieces of legislation. They are the current state of social convention about how syntax, morphology and lexicon are used. The social convention is always being negotiated to deal with new experiences, viewpoints and social perceptions of things like class. This means that the more something gets used, the more that our inner 'polling' of frequency will adjust to normalise something. So something that seems wrong will sound okay over time with enough use. This has happened over many unremarked things in my lifetime. For example, the Americanism "it is not so big of a thing" now sounds normal and I might even find I say it myself because I hear it so often. It is replacing the rule of my childhood where one could only so "It is not so big a thing". It tends only to be the politically charged things that get remarked on and fought over.

The phrase in my title about ears popping, I am recycling from the early eighties when it seemed that for many of us the use of 'he' to include women seemed wrong -even though replacing it was fraught with difficulty. But some referred to that in circles where liturgy was discussed as 'if your ears have popped' -that moment when you could no longer hear 'he' as gender neutral. This ear popping moment is the precursor to the next ear-popping moment -when 'they' begins to feel okay as a singular in wider syntactic domains. If we practise it, we can hasten it by priming our inner polling facility.

I think the interesting thing to keep an eye on as a testing measure of what is happening would be at what point singular 'they' for God becomes possible. I've just started experimenting with it in writing prayers, but I'm still looking for a way to do it that would act as a bridge from 'he [/she]' to they. I suspect an explicitly trinitarian setting is the way forward.

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