Skip to main content
Bondi Media

Singular 😱 They

Less sexist (or simply more unassuming) language is about the right of frequently marginalised people (women, gay 🏳️‍🌈 transgender 🏳️‍⚧️ etc.) being addressed as they see fit. Creepy conservatives and other dogrooters misappropriate words like ‘woke’ to crap 💩 on such attempts at equality.

singular they t-shirt
@webbed-briefs

The OED says singular ‘they’ is the (personal) pronoun used to replace ‘he’ or ’she’ where the gender of the antecedent (the word the pronoun refers to) is ‘unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary’. As in …

‘Everyone loves her/his their mother.’

And written usage of this dates back to the year 1375, at least.

But then, in the 18th century, so-called ‘grammarians’ forgot that singular ‘you’ was also a plural pronoun that had become singular as well and, instead, declared that singular ‘they’ was wrong because a plural pronoun is not supposed to take a singular antecedent. 🤦🏼‍♀️

But ‘you’ had been used as a polite singular for centuries and had largely replaced ‘thou’, ’thee’ and ‘thy’ causing predictable reactionary resistance.

For example, in 1660, George Fox (the god-bothering fuckwit founder of Quakerism) wrote a book calling — much like Peter ‘dumndumerer’ Dutton attacking those disagreeing with his racist reactionary dogrootering world-view — anyone who used singular ‘you’ an ‘idiot or a fool.’ 🤪

But, by then, anyone still using ‘thou’ or ‘thee’ was described as a ‘fool and an idiot or a Quaker’ (the primitive progenitors of the C🪨al-ition) — or just hopelessly out of date — just like Peter ‘dumndumerer’ Dutton! 😂

Singular ’you’ is normal and unremarkable just like the ‘royal we’ or for those (like us!) without royalty — the ‘editorial we’ — first-person gender neutral plurals all — used as singulars without incident or harm.

People who want to be inclusive or respectful of other people’s preferences use singular ‘they’ and people who don’t want to be inclusive or respect other people’s preferred pronouns use it too.

So, singular ‘they’ along with its inflected (added to adjectives) or derivative (added to verbs) forms: ‘them’ ‘their’ ‘theirs’ and ‘themselves’ (also ‘themself’ and ‘theirself’) is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. Typically, it occurs nowadays with an indeterminate antecedent (a pronoun not referring to specific persons or things) in sentences such as …

A cunt 🌮 co-worker left ‘their’ cheese 🧀 in the fucking fridge. 😡