You know the problem: "Everyone has a right to their opinion."Arts & Letters Daily recently linked to an essay recording author Jjoan Ttabor Altieri's (really Joan Tabor Altieri's) gradual acceptance over thirty years of the singular pronoun "they." Everyone does, she thinks in Singular They: The Pronoun that Came in from the Cold, have a right to their opinion. Historically, I grant she's right.
But might Altieri agree that the here-analogical difference between "sense" and "reference" — or Sinn and Bedeutung as Gottlob Frege has taught generations of modern philosophers to think — also blunts her point? Let me explain.
It is true, of course, that "their" means everyone in the sense of a plural group, but might it be the case, too, that "everyone" still refers to the singular verb "has" as does the group's singular "opinion"? Although I grant such matters are trivial as matters grammatical, rhetorical, and logical always are, still, maybe they allow me to express yet another point.
It is that I will continue to remind my students that 1 ≠ 2. While I agree one should perhaps mark no more precision in English than our language allows, I am still allowed, as Frege reminds us — with respect to meaning and to reference — sometimes to be plural and sometimes singular.
Meanwhile, I suggest that the example, "Everyone has a right to their opinion," unnecessarily complicates the matter of using "they" as a singular pronoun. Using "everyone" as a plural pronoun is one problem; using "they" as a singular neuter pronoun is another.
How about "The student left their book" or "The suspect left their prints at the scene"? Are we ready for that?
Posted by Mary Lee on October 2, 2003 03:09 PM
If you mean English teachers, of course, "no." Leafing through the set of research papers I graded last June, I found this apt sentence: "The problem arises that unless a person has been there by reading this report they would be misled to believe that the human circle were in close vicinity to the Convention Center."
Apart from its aptness to the things English teachers find conventionally important, the sentence fails to note any persons at stake in the global problem it in fact refers to: the Seattle Police Department's (un?)misleading report of rioting at the WTO meeting (1999).
The larger problem is more the author's catching the very disease he perhaps wishes to avoid: the unconscious substitution of statistical aggregates (corporate "theys") for democracy's "persons."
But don't get me started on American legal anomalies like General Dynamics v. Sleepy Citizens; I'd only refer you then to Ruskin's Unto This Last.
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