Saturday, January 19, 2019

singular they - Is it acceptable to use "he" as a neutral pronoun?


In Italian, when I am talking about an unknown person, I would use the third person singular, masculine. For example, I could say Chi ha rubato le chiavi alla ragazza รจ qualcuno che ha potuto avvicinarsi alla ragazza (literally, "he who has stolen the girl's keys is somebody who has been able to approach the girl"); if I would use the feminine gender, I would imply I am talking of a woman/girl. In this case, the sentence would not use qualcuno, but qualcuna.


Is using he as a neutral gender acceptable in English?
A friend of mine said that she considers using he as a neutral pronoun acceptable, but I have noticed that (for example) some error messages given from applications, or web sites use the singular they.



Answer



Would your example in full be something like this in English?



I don’t know who has stolen the girl's keys. [?] is somebody who has been able to approach the girl.




In that case we can begin the second sentence with It. This is unusual, and it doesn’t mean that the thief is inanimate. Rather, it refers to the entire thieving episode.


StoneyB’s answer gives a good picture of the overall situation, but I would be less cautious about using they to refer to a singular antecedent. Such use has a long and respectable history as shown here. Moreover, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of they is



Often used in reference to a singular noun made universal by every, any, no, etc., or applicable to one of either sex (= ‘he or she’).



For those who find such use awkward, a workaround is often available by making the antecedent itself plural.


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