death to singular 'they'

[fox]

'Note that if a child did not use the SDG [speaker's direction of gaze] strategy, they would be thrown back on the alternative, namely, assuming that a novel word uttered by a speaker refers to the object that they (the listener) are currently looking at.' from "Do Children with Autism Use the Speaker's Direction of Gaze Strategy to Crack the Code of Language?", by Simon Baron-Cohen, Dare A. Baldwin, and Mary Crowson, in Child Development, February 1997, 68(1), 48-57.

a child ... they. the listener are. can y'all hear me gouging my eyes out over here?

[eta: especially when there already is a plural antecedent! don't they see the confusion this can cause?! 'Parents do not announce to their infant, "look where I look when I utter a novel word" (because they wouldn't understand this anyway) ...']

answer me this: what the hell would have been wrong, in this context, with "if children did not use the SDG, they would be thrown back on the alternative, namely, assuming that a novel word uttered by a speaker refers [actually i'd prefer 'referred'] to the object that they (the listeners) are ['were'] currently looking at"? what?!

Comments

[lexin.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on that.

Not because I think it's better language, but in the environment I work in (government) we have to do mental fandangoes to avoid using sexist language. The singular 'they' is a useful beast if you're trying to avoid giving offence to the minority (it's 5% of the total) of single parent fathers who claim maintenance. This group a very, very vocal if they perceive that they're being ignored, and using the singular 'they' is infinitely preferable to dealing with furious ten page letters from Angry Single Father of Cheltenham.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

personally, i tend to alternate generic "he" with generic "she", and my life is pretty good. but when (as for this one professor i have who hates generic either-gender) i can't do that, "he or she" works better than "they". ('the listener are' really doesn't make you insane?)

[lexin.livejournal.com]

Rather than using 'the listener are' and such phrases, I think I'd avoid it by casting the whole sentence into plural - 'listeners are...they...' and so on.

What I meant above is that when you're being paid to write, you are obliged to follow your employer's style guidelines whatever you might think about them. Our style guidelines state that a singular 'their' is preferred over the clumsy 'he or she', particularly if you're going to have to use it five times in a comparatively short paragraph. And it really isn't a good idea in the kind of writing I do to appear to favour one gender over the other - if 95% of applicants for child maintenance are female, that means 5% of them are male, and you ignore that at your peril.