The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
Singular They
I’ve been a fan of Khan Academy for awhile. They offer free online classes about many different topics; math, physics, biology, programming, etc., for kids and adults. I like their straightforward style.
Recently I decided to take a grammar course. No, not just because I’m weird. I wanted to improve my writing. In particular I get confused about punctuation, but I decided to start at the beginning of the grammar course as a refresher.
Fun fact – the singular “they” has been used for hundreds of years. It was only very recently that we started being taught otherwise.
In my observation, (and your case may vary, depending on the school district), but in general it seems like the Boomers were taught to use “he” as the generic for when gender is unknown – exacerbating patriarchal bias. To combat the bias, Gen Xers were taught to say “he or she” every time – awkward! and the Millennials were taught to randomly sometimes use “he” and other times use “she” – confusing!
So why did your high school teacher try so hard to stamp out the singular they? Watch the video to find out!
Apparently awhile ago a group of grammarians decided we’d sound more sophisticated if we incorporated more Latin grammar into our language. Yes, English has some Latin roots, but English is most decidedly not Latin. I discovered that when I attempted to take Latin in high school! Plus, maybe my memory is failing me, but in order to sound like Latin, wouldn’t we need to move our verbs to the end of our sentences? That would ridiculous be.
PS. I love an educational video that includes the phrase “pompous class markers”, lol!
Also, by the way, “you” is plural, so “you all” is redundant. But once language starts heading in a direction, there’s not much you or I can do about it.
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