I’ve been using ‘they’ for years when translating official documents, even where a gendered term is used in the original to refer to an office. Despite having my work reviewed by dozens of editors, it’s never been picked up on as a mistake or changed. My inner grammarian likewise found it awkward for a while, but they’re mostly ok about it now.
My favourite gender neutral solution is ell@s/nosotr@s etc. in Spanish. It just seems like a good way of indicating both genders without inventing a completely new word that you have to explain every time you use it, and without taking up any extra space on the page. I’m not sure if you can say it though, which is a drawback. I’ve seen a number of people use the female form as a gender neutral term too. In English you sometimes get people alternating between he and she (especially when taking about kids, it seems). That just seems awkward to me, but I guess it’s one way to do it.
I do like some of the discussions that I’ve seen. Having a set of pronouns that are “all gender inclusive” as well as an additional set of explicitly defined neuter pronouns would seem warranted for some interactions, just as Ms. works as a way to indicate “female: marital status explicitly excluded”.
Them / they works as a genderless pronoun. It has been used this way for hundreds of years. Yes it has the obvious defect of not specifying singular or plural, but that’s okay for non-prescriptive grammarians.
We’ve tried this for years. Timothy Leary was an advocate, and it suffers the same problem that Esperanto does – it feels constructed. “Firefighter” is a reasonable word with strong hooks into words we know. “Xe” and “Hir” and similar contrivances offer no hook into existing terminology, however strongly some folks contend that they do.
In casual speech, “they” can work for “he” or “she”, but in print, it just doesn’t work.
“Carol picked up Ron and Mary at the store. They drove them home.”
Wha?
“Carol picked up Ron and Mary at the store. Xe drove them home.”
Wha?
Irritations aside, we need injections of things like this to keep language moving and on its toes and keep us thinking about such things. It’s only when we’re prodded like this do we see the contours of our assumptions and internalized thinking.
The best way I can think to sum it up is that I find it hard to imagine a Lojban or Esperanto enthusiast, but I can easily see a Klingon one.
Except that despite the urban legend to the contrary, there are far more Esperantists than any other constructed language – and they’ve used it more, with thousands of books and magazines published over the years and still new ones every year. I’ve read “The Lord of the Rings” in Esperanto translation, not to mention various Chinese and Eastern European books not in English translation. I’ve even read several original novels in the language Meanwhile, Klingon just has a couple of Shakespearean translations and one of Gilgamesh. And those are a decade old or more.
What’s the attraction? Do I think that everyone is going to learn Esperanto? No, but it was fun to get to literary fluency in the language in a surprisingly short period of time, and unlike Klingon or Quenya or Lojban there is actually a non-trivial literature to the language and a thriving culture.
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There are also a couple films done entirely in Esperanto (one starring William Shatner). Klingon is only given a few lines in a few films (some starring William Shatner).
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I had friends who worked in service when I was in my 20’s… Often we would refer to them as “waitrons” - with an emphasis on the RON at the end (ie, it didn’t rhyme with apron). We enjoyed the cyborg feel of it. And I still occasionally refer to servers as such (though generally not to the servers specifically, more as an in-joke with said friends).
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It’s just not that simple to come up with wholly new terms that won’t have already meaning to some group of people. Avoiding conflicts between cultural groups and development of naming is already a business, and it’s an important part of branding. It has been for quite some time, especially since international trade is now so commonplace. Tanj Branding are pros at it. Among other things, they named the Nintendo Wii and the Sony Bravia.
http://www.tanjbranding.com/namingppc4/?gclid=CNvz0pyKhb8CFUhufgodA14AQw#sthash.xXubbKCB.dpbs
One mistake the school-board made is that they didn’t realize just how difficult the task they were addressing was. They probably failed to even think about populations outside their own (the school district offices) but well within their reach (communities that are serviced by the school district).
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Carol picked up Ron and Mary at the store and then drove them home.
The well-read among us know that firemen START fires.
You’re mistaken.
The fires been always burning since the worlds been turning
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What’s even stranger is that they picked one (out of many) of the less popular options instead the most popular option, both in and outside the community - “they/them/their”.
(Brazilian) Portuguese, also, shs its xs.
Why not just the standard “waiting staff” or “wait staff”?
Carol picked up Mary at the store. She drove her home.
What’s the problem? As others have pointed out, the they has been used as singular for hundreds of years. If we grew up thinking it wasn’t because of a time when people decided to teach it that way, we just need to get over that.
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This was the kind of restaurant where one had to wear 20 pieces of flair. Naturally they would want their own special terminology.
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Because it was fun to come up with interesting names for their jobs (which they universally hated), and “wait staff” isn’t very funny. Let me be clear - we weren’t making up names to make fun of servers, this was a case of people who were actually working as servers who made up these names on their own.
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I formal English “they” has been a singular genderless pronoun for at least 500 years.
