This is a reminder that on <date>, <person> sent you an invitation to become part of their professional network at <site>.The administrators at <site> were quite certain that <person> is a single individual; they were less sure of his sex. (I happen to know <person> and that he is a man.) I think that this increasingly common attempt to co-opt "they" (or worse, "it") to fix a perceived deficiency in English is ugly.
The <site>'s editors' problem is not that English does not have a gender-neutral, third-person, singular, animate pronoun. Hell, some languages don't even have a gender-neutral "they." In Hebrew and Arabic, for instance, only "I" and "we" are are sexless, all other pronouns have gender, and speakers address groups of men and women differently. Gender-specific "you" allows endless gay jokes when translating "I love you"s from English or when covering, in a male voice, songs written from a woman's perspective.
There are any number of ways to rephrase this invalid of a sentence that are grammatical. "His or her network" works as does "<person>'s network." Paraphrasing Mark Twain, only kings and people with tapeworms are entitled to a royal "they."
2 comments:
You may think it's ugly, but it has longer precedent than you probably realize: Shakespeare used it.
Thank you for pointing this out. I did some searching and found this page, inter alia: http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html
There are many examples on it; most seem to relate to undefined multitudes of people, as in Shakespeare's "God send every one their heart's desire!" Even though "every one" is syntactically singular, Margaret could as easily have used "all people in the world." The modern usage that I find ugly is using "they" to refer to a specific, single individual.
Incidentally, and I believe this is more common in British usage, "they" can quite legitimately refer to assemblies of individuals, even when the assembly itself is referred to in singular. One common case is referring to actions of a single corporation: "British Petroleum are exploring..." The implication is that a corporation is a group of individuals, even if it is (syntactically) singular.
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