A story completely unrelated to transgender issues supports a grammatical argument I make against the use of the pronoun they to identify any individual, trans, cis or otherwise.
Inside Higher Ed reports that the University of Notre Dame Law School raised some applicants’ hackles last week by pushing admitted applicants to submit their admissions deposits and then refusing to take any more deposits when the law school reached its maximum:
Admitted applicants to University of Notre Dame Law School were told upon acceptance that there were no reserved spaces for students. The deadline was April 15, but if the university received its maximum number of $600 deposits, the rest of the admitted students would be waitlisted.
On Tuesday, a few minutes before 11 a.m. Eastern time, Notre Dame sent those admitted students an email. Two-thirds of the seats had been claimed by deposits, a benchmark usually reached two to three days before the deadline. The email said Notre Dame would send another note when 80 percent of seats were reserved, and two more emails when 90 and 100 percent of seats were claimed.
Five hours later, 80 percent of spots were taken, Notre Dame told admits. One hour after that, at 5 p.m., Notre Dame told applicants there was no more time.
“We have now reached our target number of deposits,” the email said. “We have turned off our deposit forms to ensure that we do not overenroll” [Lilah Burke, “A ‘Bank Run’ at Notre Dame Law,” Inside Higher Ed, 2021.04.08].
Now the main story here is that Notre Dame Law’s deposit push was just one more example of the many ways that universities raise hurdles to low-income Americans’ aspirations for equal educational opportunity:
…applicants who did not have reliable internet, were working, or were paralyzed by the unexpected choice in front of them had their offer rescinded. Even if an applicant knew that Notre Dame was the school they wanted to attend, some applicants just could not drop $600 at a moment’s notice. These students earned their spot and may have been saving up for the deposit and waiting for family, friends, or a future paycheck.
For lower-income applicants, especially applicants who may be tapped out financially from LSAT preparation, exam fees, and school application fees, the deposit (and in some cases a second deposit) is just one more hurdle. You can’t pay your law school seat deposit from loans or scholarship money.
Exploding offers cannot become the norm. The law school admissions process will be untenable if applicants worry that every offer has an unpredictable expiration date. Further, these offers penalize applicants who can’t make $600 appear after a string of emails over the course of six hours. And to be clear: it is completely normal to not be able to come up with $600 in six hours [Kyle McEntee and Sydney Montgomery, “Chaos Reigns: Notre Dame Law School Tells Non-Wealthy Students ‘Thanks, But No Thanks’,” Above the Law, 2021.04.07].
One somewhat luckier than normal working applicant manage to scrape together $600 in about 30 minutes but didn’t beat the rush. To maintain anonymity and torque off the admissions office, that applicant asked Inside Higher Ed to describe the applicant with the plural pronoun:
“Earlier this week I decided that I would be depositing this Thursday, the 8th. I chose that date not arbitrarily but because that’s the date when I receive my paycheck,” said one admitted student, who has struggled financially. “I live paycheck to paycheck and work two jobs to support myself.”
The student, who wished to remain anonymous and asked to be referred to as “they” so as to not jeopardize further chances with Notre Dame, saw the emails about 67 percent capacity and realized they didn’t have the funds available to make a deposit. Notre Dame was the student’s first-choice law school.
“I knew at that moment that I did not have the money and would try to scrape together the funds from several accounts of mine when I received the 80 percent email,” they said. “I made a few phone calls; I transferred funds from account to account. I would say that I did all of this within 20 to 30 minutes of receiving that email. When I went into the Notre Dame confirmation website, I was able to confirm a seat, but I was not able to pay my deposit.”
After trying in several different browsers, they received the email informing them that they were being moved to the wait list [Burke, 2021.04.08].
Here’s a journalistic situation where, even with an explanation, using they to describe one person can confuse readers. Here, they can create the false impression that the reporter has more than one source for this portion of the story. In journalism, the difference between a single anonymous source and multiple anonymous sources is a big deal. The reporter here makes an effort to avoid any such confusion, but the reporter could achieve greater clarity with equal source protection by eschewing all pronouns and consistently using a singular noun: the source, the admitted student, etc.
The reporter does not attempt to create any false impression. The reporter has another source who explains how the surprise cut-off left him out in the cold:
Another applicant admitted to Notre Dame said other places he applied took a while to get back to him with acceptance letters or scholarship offers. When he finally decided on Notre Dame, he spoke with his parents about whether the university was financially feasible for the family. On Monday, they told him it was. He planned to place his deposit Tuesday.
Notre Dame’s emails went out on Tuesday, but he was working at his landscaping job and couldn’t check his email. When he got home at 6:30 p.m., he tried to submit his deposit and found he could not.
“I don’t understand how they essentially didn’t have a mechanism in place to stop the bank run that they caused and all the chaos that ensued,” he said. “The way they did it, it just turned into luck of the draw, who has the ability to check their email during the day, and for other students, who has the ability to have $600 lying around to drop on an immediate notice” [Burke, 2021.04.08].
The pronoun issue is a minor facet of this story. But for the best reporting, we must speak with constant clarity. Using plural pronouns to describe one person erodes clarity. Until new singular pronouns gain traction, we should reserve they/them/their to describe multiple people and protect anonymity and other concerns by other stylistic choices that preserve number agreement.
It has been pretty common practice – at least in spoken language here in SD – to use “they” to describe a single person for as long as I can remember. I don’t see it as an issue.
If you really want to be confused by pronounal grammatical correctness, take a shot at the use of “el” (masculine) and “la” (feminine) that commonly precedes a personal name (as in “el Omar” or “la Maggie”) when speaking to an individual about a third person in Spanish. That grammatical structure has always struck me as objectifying the person being spoken of – a sort of slight.
Absolutely agree. The youngsters are really into “they” as a singular pronoun where I live. You get to choose your pronoun at UW-Madison. Not sure if this is official policy, but students seem to have pushed this. Maybe this is just a passing fad, but I think it has gained a lot of traction. We better think up a non-sexual first person singular pronoun for human beings fast or “they” will be “it” by default. “It” seems to be too impersonal, even insulting, for people to use,
My personal practice has been to use a full “he or she” when the person’s gender is unknown, not established, or not relevant.
You know, BCB, it occurs to me that “he or she” could incur a binary critique: stating just those two pronouns reinforces the idea that there are only two genders and thus oppresses those who live a third way.
Oh, Donald, I’m enough of an English teacher that I will still correct those young people when they use “they” for a singular unknown individual. If people want to refer to general things that they see people doing, they should try putting everything they say in the plural (like this sentence, which becomes grammatically cumbersome if I begin it with an indefinite singular pronoun: “If someone wants to refer…”). Of course, the journalist I quoted above does not have that option: Burke refers to a specific, known source, and Burke has to make clear that a single person is referring to that single person’s experience but must also protect that person’s identity. Thus, pronouns are out, and nouns are preferable for clarity’s sake.
“It” is absolutely not an option for fellow humans in current usage.
Here’s another one that I hear all the time: “Becky and I’s relationship is progressing quickly.” I don’t know how or when young people started using “I’s” as a substitute for “my” or just using “our relationship….”, but the first place I heard it was on “The Bachelor.” Yeah, I know it’s trash TV, but it’s a guilty pleasure, and you certainly hear a lot of folks with college degrees talking in a language that bears some similarity to English.
When my daughter was in high school we had a discussion about “…like…” being used in every other sentence, sometimes every other word. She said it’s a modifier that serves a lot of purposes, and she didn’t think she could stop saying it and “keep the meaning of what I, like, am trying to say.” I asked if she uses it in debate. “No, Daddy don’t be silly.”
Good point Cory. Here is one pronoun proposal for addressing non-binary individuals:
https://transequality.org/issues/resources/understanding-non-binary-people-how-to-be-respectful-and-supportive#:~:text=People%20whose%20gender%20is%20not,agender%2C%20bigender%2C%20and%20more.
That suggests pronouns such as “they, he and she” could all be respectful and approriate for specific non-binary individuals, depending on the circumstances. The problem with this, however, is when writing with references to unknown or unavailable specific people or generic mixed groups is that there is no one available to ask. Do you have a suggestion for a third pronoun to add to “he or she” that also would show respect for all non-binary individuals when one cannot ask an individual for a preference?
To Cory’s comment, a writer for the Packer’s blog said the best advice he was given was to re-read his work and eliminate the word they.
I suggest “qe,” pronounced “key,” would be a good pronoun for people who prefer a non-binary alternative. Qe follows the he/she sound that in common in the English for people pronouns. There is no other meaning for “qe” to confuse matters. There is the acronym “QE” used for quantitative easing, but that is never pronounced “key.”
grudznick is on board with Mr. Pays idea.
Q/they/them
Our area is simply “trans” with disrespect. So correcting verbiage is rather mute until we can modify, educate the way of thinking,. Until then we are burning rubber.
PS but nice article CH as it is good to be prepared when proper language is needed, and I know it is now, however more education is needed in order to address the content correctly, without bias.
“Becky and I’s”—I actually like that construction. It applies an existing rule—apostrophe+s to indicate possession—and applies it once to an entire compound unit—Becky and I. If we spoke the same sentence in pronouns, we wouldn’t say “her and my apples”, as that could leave room to wonder if the apples belong collectively to both of us or if we each are toting our own separate sacks of apples. The “I’s” sends up a red flag, since we know it can’t mean “my”… and I don’t think I have ever heard anyone use that bit by itself to indicate singular personal possession. We hear “I’s”, and it seems we know we must back-apply the possession to whatever person was name before the conjunction, as if the ‘s sends a set of parenthesis back around the whole compounder possessor: “(Becky and I)’s apples”, making clear that Becky and I are united in our shared possession of apples.
I can make a far clearer linguistic argument for the comprehensibility of that compound apostrophized phrase than I can for using “they” to mean one person.
Mike, I would agree that we should avoid “they” just as much as “he or she” or the misused generic “you”—replace as many vague pronouns as possible with specific actors.
Language should also respect clarity and meaning. I am not yet convinced that one person’s desire to be referred to be certain terms overrides the common need for comprehensible language.