Most people includes standard written English?

"When someone gives me their word, I trust them."

That sounds way better than "When someone gives me his or her word, I trust him or her." I don't care about technical rules in this case -- language is a tool for communication and this is the clearest way to communicate.

If we really wanted to be technically correct and concise, we could always adopt the gender-neutral "ze" (he/she) and "hir" (his/her) as official words. But they sound silly so it'll never happen.

Prop bet? I'll lay my $5 to your $4 that gender neutral pronouns, ones that currently sound silly, become standard English usage within the next 300 years. Inflation adjusted, of course. The bet will be voided in the event of a nuclear apocalypse.

Well, I'm betting on s/his, but I suppose that makes me a s/his nit.

"When someone gives me his word, I trust him." Used if the sex is known to be male, if the sex is unknown, or if speaking in the abstract. Perfectly fine for a long time, and still acceptable as long as people aren't being too PC.

And yes, I would say it or write it that way, unless I were talking to woman whose opinion of me really mattered to me and who was either known or suspected to be PC about these things. In the latter cases I would use "his or her" in the first phrase, and "his" in the second.

As I told mets, this is now very much a minority position, but let's not pretend that there is no reasonable alternative to they and their in these spots. Positing that the alternative is "he or she" is strawmanning.

It does. A majority of accepted authorities on "standard written English" now accept the use of they and their as singular pronouns in such cases. I think you would have to work hard to find an authoritative source, updated in the past ten or fifteen years, that advised using he, him and his, and only a minority would advise using he or she (etc.)

On the SAT, "each student should keep their eyes on their own paper" is still incorrect

Even though I approve of the singular their whenever it sounds right, I think that's an ugly sentence.

Also, that metonymic use of eyes is fine, I guess, because it's a standard school idiom, but it's kind of funny how often it's misused.

From one slushkiller dump:

The eyes of the braver animals ran down my neck and spine.

Sudenly, all the eyes in the room rose from their fixed positions on the floor to stare at him.

Mona was on the liquilounge, her dark eyes pouring over him like warm jello.

Of course, his eyes couldn't help but embrace the pool in front of them.

I'm not sure we should discount the power of language by flippantly writing off awareness of its inherent gender bias as "too PC." Sure, it's acceptable to default to "he" for now, but the point is to evolve and to take into account the discrimination that can be perpetuated even with the simplest word choice.

It does really suck though that we don't have an alternative, because another method I see somewhat frequently is authors defaulting to "she," which is equally annoying.

Source?

I know that on the GMAT, and I believe but do not know that this applies to the SAT, they avoid the question entirely: They give no questions on with answers that are affected by this issue. Yes, they test subject/verb agreement; no, they do not test it in this way.

http://www.bestschools.org/hs/library/SAT/grammar.htm

but I will look at some SATs from the last few years as well, since I am 90% sure it has been tested

hmm the example on the college board website isn't great

After hours of futile debate, the committee has decided b to postpone further discussion c of the resolution until d their next meeting. e No error

• (A)
• (B)
• (C)
• (D)
• (E)

Correct!
Explanation

Difficulty: Hard

• The error in this sentence occurs at (D). A pronoun must agree in number (singular or plural) with the noun to which it refers. Here, the plural pronoun "their" incorrectly refers to the singular noun "committee."

The sentence below is incorrect because the pronoun and the noun don’t agree in number:



Every student at the party tried to look
their
best . No error . A B C D E
This sentence begins with the singular noun student, so the pronoun must be singular too. Their is plural and therefore wrong in this sentence.

http://www.sparknotes.com/testprep/b...section3.rhtml

NK is right on both counts. Using the "too PC" argument is about as intellectually sound as waving your hands in the air. Even the old-school nits at Chicago Manual of Style who don't accept the singular they in formal written language recognize "he is no longer accepted as a generic pronoun referring to a person of either sex."

Using "she" instead of "he" as a gender neutral pronoun is just as bad. I've also seen authors alternate, using "he" as the gender neutral pronoun one paragraph or chatper, then switching to "she" for the next. This usage is terribly awkward.

Just as they is not singular, he and she are not gender neutral. Yet for a long time "he" was accepted as a generic pronoun referring to a person of either sex. So now it's "they's" turn to be misused to fill the gender neutral void. Language usage needs to evolve when it can't accommodate what people want to express. We shouldn't have to limit our ability to express ourselves in order to accommodate limitations in our language. If there is no way to properly express our thoughts in our language, the language needs to change.

English no longer has a gender-neutral singular pronoun. It needs one. The people have spoken and "they" has won.

One common suggestion for avoiding the singular they is to restructure sentences like this to plural: Students should keep their eyes on their own papers.


This is not a gender neutral singular pronoun issue as "it's" is correct here so there is absolutely no excuse to use "they": After hours of futile debate, the committee has decided to postpone further discussion of the resolution until it's next meeting.

obviously i know it's "its". Just trying to tilt you.

Mets, the second example is from a test prep site, not the College Board people; my guess is that they are behind the times with respect to whether that error is actually being tested. The first example is subject/verb agreement but is otherwise not apposite. We are considering not where "they" and "their" are plural in general, but whether in this specific usage — to denote an unknown, generic person, a la "one" — they can be considered singular. The weight of authority today, in 2012, says yes, to that specific question. A couple decades ago it was shifting, and thirty years ago the answer was definitely no.

Well said.

It tilts me no end when I hear Spanish speakers continually referring to their 'fathers' or their 'sons' when they need the gender neutral forms.

English has evolved beyond that.

I just looked through questions of the day from the past year and you appear correct. A lot of their/its but I don't see their/ his. I'm shocked

This is a particularly tricky one. While "until its next meeting" is correct here, if the sentence instead read
then that would be correct! (In that case, the committee is no longer acting as a unified body.)

Just have to get this one off my chest or I won't be able to sleep at night :P

I saw this on FB:

"I'm at a loss for words"

This phrase has always tilted me because because athough he says has no words to describe what he's feeling, he just used five to describe what he is feeling.

I get tilted when people don't know how to count.

I was about to correct him, but assuming we're in the same time zone and he has a normal sleep cycle (big assumptions, I know), he might've been tired, in which case it's easy enough to miscount seven words as five.