English has been calling out for a gender-neutral pronoun for more than a century, with many failed attempts at invented words and portmanteaus. Singular "they" — once the scourge of schoolhouse grammarians — has now emerged to become the pronoun of choice for many outside the so-called gender binary.
TRANSCRIPT
From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter, and you know, these days, some of you probably know I'm writing pieces for The New York Times, and in The New York Times, not long ago, I wrote a piece about the new, new usage of “they.” And as you might imagine, I like it. Well, I've gotten a lot of very interesting feedback about my take on that. I wouldn't say hate mail, just mail from people very urgently telling me that I'm probably making a mistake, that I don't understand the full import of the call to use “they” in this new, new way. I'll let you know soon what I mean by “new, new.” I thought I would dedicate this episode to a response to people who just can't get with the new, new “they.” And it's not because they don't understand that language changes, but they see this as societally different from the way language generally changes. Folks, I get you, but let's talk about it. Let's talk about “they.”
It's a word that's been uniquely subject to transformation. There's always something going on with “they” in English, it seems. Way back in Old English, the word for “they,” for one thing, was not what you'd expect. You'd think that would be something like thag or something. No, it wasn't. The word for “they” was HEE-uh, of all things. Hee-uh. And so, you just had to make do with that. And I say “make do” because HEE-uh is “they.” “He” is hē and “she” is hēo. So all of those are a little ominously similar. Hē, hēo, HEE-uh is “he,” “she,” “they” in the earliest English that we know. And if you talked about “to them,” like, you know, “give them the log,” “give the log to them,” then it was hem, just as it was in the singular. And so hem, “to him,” hem, “to them.” So there was a lot of this similarity. And it got really bad because, as you might imagine, hē and hēo, “he” and “she.” There were people who would say, just, hē for “she,” but then you've got hē and hē, meaning both “he” and “she” — hardly unheard of in languages, but this was a language where it hadn't been that way before. And of course, these things are different from dialect to dialect.
So people would have known something is falling together. And then, HEE-uh. Well, after a while, you say that over and over and you might get hē, hē, hē. That was falling to sound like “he” and “she” too. This falling together would have felt funny to some people. And even if they weren't thinking of it consciously, it's the sort of thing where if English is the language that you're speaking — and English used to be a certain way — you might want to fix that. So you've got this HEE-uh that's just become hē and you've got the same word for “he,” “she,” and “they.” There are languages that do just fine like that, but English hadn't been one of them.
Now, the old story about what happened to “they” in this situation is that English grabbed a word from Old Norse. The idea is that starting in 787 C.E. — I still think of it as A.D., but I'm told I have to say C.E. these days — the Vikings come, Scandinavian Vikings. They don't speak English, they speak Norse, and it's mostly men. They marry English speaking women. And next thing you know, there's this entire boatload of Norse words that come into English, including, you know, “get,” “happy,” “neck,” “skirt.” All of these are Old Norse words. They weren't originally in English. Well, it's supposed to be that something else came from Norse, and that is “they/their/them,” because in Old Norse, the word for “they” wasn't this HEE-uh thing. (Well, wrong voice for Old English.) HEE-uh — wasn't that. In Old Norse, It was þeir. Þeir. Not “they,” but þeir. Whole lot more like what we're used to than this HEE-uh thing. So it used to be thought (by many it still is thought) that English borrowed these pronouns from Old Norse.
Now, I'm getting to something here. I'm not going into the weeds. I'm getting to this for a reason. It turns out that if you really look at that situation closely, and not many people had until relatively recently, the truth is that English didn't go grabbing pronouns from some other language. English used itself for this “they.” Old English had goofy gender, just like so many of the languages that you learn from English and are frustrated by. You had masculine, feminine and neuter. And for the most part, you just had to know. And then there was plural, which was all three. But this meant that you had four “thes.” “The” was different if you were in the singular, masculine, feminine, neuter. Then there was a plural “the.” That word was tha. And if you really look at how things appear in the documents and when and in what form, it's pretty clear that “they” came from this word for “the” that you use with a bunch of things. So “the ducks,” you know, “the Atari sets” or something like that. That “the” became “they.”
So what happened is that the language, in a sense, needed or at least wanted a separate word for “they” and it lost it. And so, people were looking for some other one, and they went somewhere else in the language and they grabbed a word that roughly meant “the.” Or if you stretched it, it kind of meant “these” and “those.” This is a theory that is put forth most cogently (for those of you who are interested in these things and wondering where I'm getting it) by Marcelle Cole. But it is gaining increasing influence. I very much support it. And this is why I'm harping on it: Many people have written me that we need to create, for example, a gender neutral pronoun. So it can't be “he,” can't be “she,” shouldn't be “they.” We need to have something else. And so, there are popular alternatives such as “ze.” And the truth is, people have been trying to create these for a very, very long time. There was a certain efflorescence in the 70s, one suggestion was, was “heesh.” That’s “he” and “she” put together.
It would be very interesting, but you know, the truth is pronouns are seeded so deeply in our cognition. We use them so much. They label something as elemental as the other people in our lives and their relationship to our us and our us-ness. It's really hard to borrow pronouns from another language or to just create a new one. How do you slide that in? How do you start all over again? Of course, there may be people or even subgroups who are particularly interested in using this new word, and they will put themselves to doing it. But especially in a large society, how do you create new pronouns? In terms of how languages affect each other, they affect each other all the time, but they don't usually share pronouns. That's kind of like people sharing the same toothbrush. And so, in a way, what really happened in Old English — which was not grabbing something from Old Norse but almost certainly grabbing something from Old English itself — it means that if we're going to solve our problems with pronouns no longer seeming to correspond to the way a critical mass of people see themselves in a modern society, probably we need to recruit something that's already in the language rather than trying to create something brand new.
Now, what I don't want to do here is repeat the show that I did on “they” before. I did an episode of Lexicon Valley, good while back now, 2018. It was called “The Rise of ‘They.’” I know that not many of you have listened to all — this is the 138th episode of Lexicon Valley that I've done, goodness gracious. Some of you have, and I am immensely flattered by your obsessiveness because you're like me, you're a completist. I listen to every episode of things, too. Most people haven't, and I can imagine most people weren't listening to this in 2018. But I did do it. And very quick summary is that the first “they” problem that people think of is what used to be called good old, singular “they.” And so, tell each student that they can hand their paper in when they want to. And that leaves you to not have to specify whether it is a boy or a girl or anything else. And you just have this generic reference. You're not being specific. And so, “a person can't help their birth,” that sort of thing. That was from Vanity Fair. And it's a hint that singular “they” isn't something that happened when apparently everything fell apart after the 60s, when people started using marijuana more openly or something. I don't know what's supposed to have happened recently that means that language just falls apart. But if Thackeray was already saying a person can't help their birth, you know that there's probably something about just the nature of English, where if you're looking for some sort of generic gender neutral pronoun, well, you take it from the resources of the language itself, and it is “they” for us. And it actually goes back to the 13 and 1400s. You've got it in Shakespeare. You've got it in Middle English, it doesn't even sound quite like English. Only in the 1800s, did certain, always self-appointed, grammarians decide that they didn't like singular “they” because “they” is plural. They're asserting this like it's something that’s undeniable and basic and unitary as the nature of protons and neutrons or something: “They” is plural.Well, you know, good for you. They said that. But in the meantime, people have kept on using singular “they.”
But now there's what I sometimes call the new, new “they.” And this is the o
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