A Word, Please: Language changes despite their protests

On the National Review website, contributor Josh Gelernter recently decried a “violence” being committed against the English language: the use of “they” as a singular.

Here’s the basic idea. “They” is traditionally plural (“The kids knew they were in the right place”). But people use it as a singular when they want to refer to one person whose sex isn’t known, which is often the case when talking about members of groups: “Everyone should make sure they lock their car.”

Singular “they” and its cousins singular “their,” “them” and “themselves” have been supported by everyone from Jane Austen (“I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly”) to Lord Byron (“Nobody here seems to look into an Author, ancient or modern, if they can avoid it”) to Shakespeare (“And everyone to rest themselves betake”) to a little best-seller known as the Bible (“If ye from your hearts forgive everyone not his brother their trespasses”).

More recently, the American Dialect Society gave singular “they” a shot in the arm by naming it word of the year.

Yet people like Gelernter believe their personal tastes overrule every author up to and including God. Gelernter insists we should use “he” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun because, he wrote, “Trying to depluralize ‘they’ is an asinine effort stemming from a stupid misunderstanding by stupid people.”

There’s a lot of venom in that statement — so much anger, in fact, that it raises some serious questions. Did something happen to Gelernter when he was a little girl? Was he a bullied little girl? Was he one of those little girls to whom no one ever taught basic etiquette or decent research skills? Or was he just born a mean girl?

We can’t know for sure. All we can know is that a man who opposes the natural evolution of language can’t object to his childhood self being called a girl. You see, the word “girl” didn’t always mean a female child. It used to mean a child of either sex.

Here’s what the Gelernters of the world don’t want to accept: Language changes. A word means one thing. People start using it differently. Eventually, it comes to have a new meaning.

If you think that’s bad — if you think it’s a shame that the word can’t keep meaning the thing it used to mean — you’re forgetting that the process repeats, over and over. A word you love today could have been someone else’s linguistic nightmare.

Ever use the verb “donate”? That would have made you a monster to language sticklers just over a century ago.

“I need hardly say, that this word [donate] is utterly abominable — one that any lover of simple honest English cannot hear with patience and without offence,” Richard Grant White, author of “Words and Their Uses,” wrote in 1872, as cited in Merriam-Webster’s.

“Audition,” “commodity,” “fine,” “minority” and “merry” are the subjects of a recent TED Talk by John McWhorter titled “Five Words That Don’t Mean What They Used to Mean.”

Language cops like Gelernter don’t like these changes. Sometimes they get nasty, with talk of “asinine” ideas and “stupid people.” But for my money, the nastiest part of Gelernter’s piece was his dishonest sourcing.

In making the argument that we should all use “he” as our gender-neutral singular pronoun, Gelernter cited what he calls “the dictionary of record”: Webster’s Second International Unabridged.

This is dirty pool. He’s betting that most readers don’t know that Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate is the dictionary of record for most of book publishing and that Webster’s New World is the official source for most news media.

Unlike these living reference books, Gelernter’s “dictionary of record” is an edition from the 1950s, rendering it obsolete for any use other than giving false legitimacy to bad ideas. Merriam’s and Webster’s New World, by the way, both support singular “they.”

Still, if you’re the kind of guy who disavows every dictionary printed after 1956, the only thing I can say to you is, “You go, girl.”

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JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.