Editorial: An Editor Changes Their Mind About They

When I began my career in 1980, women were a small fraction of the engineering workforce, and engineers were typically referred to by the pronouns he and him. That sexist language bothered me, so wherever I could, I used gender-neutral terms — such as synthetic instead of man-made, and firefighter instead of fireman — and rewrote sentences to avoid the need for any pronoun. In all that time, I was vigilant to not write they or their with a singular antecedent.

For example, take the sentence, “Every chemical engineer should have _____ own copy of Perry’s Handbook.” According to the rules I learned, “Every chemical engineer should have their own copy of Perry’s Handbook” is an example of incorrect grammar, because the plural pronoun their does not agree in number with the singular antecedent engineer. Instead, we could rewrite the sentence as either “Every chemical engineer should have his or her own copy of Perry’s Handbook” (rather awkward, and generally not preferred), or “All chemical engineers should have their own copy of Perry’s Handbook.” (Better yet, we could write “All chemical engineers should own a copy of Perry’s Handbook,” thereby replacing the weaker verb have with the stronger verb own. But I digress …)

As editors, we take pride in using correct grammar. But, like so much else, the notion of correct grammar changes. A few years ago (May 2012), I wrote about the acceptability of the word hopefully as a sentence adverb, in an editorial titled “Hopefully, Change Won’t Be Difficult.” That prompted me to lift the ban on the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb in CEP. (One perk of being editor-in-chief is that I can make such style-related decisions; I try to wield that power judiciously.)

It now appears that I need to get comfortable with another change: the singular they. In January, the American Dialect Society (ADS) named they as a gender-neutral singular pronoun as the Word of the Year for 2015. (They also took the Most Useful Word honors.) The press release on the ADS website notes that “The use of singular they builds on centuries of usage, appearing in the work of writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen. In 2015, singular they was embraced by the Washington Post style guide. Bill Walsh, copy editor for the Post, described it as ‘the only sensible solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun.’”

Singular they was also a popular topic of discussion at the national conference of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES) last spring. Lisa McLendon wrote in the ACES newsletter: “At ACES2015, (non)acceptance of the singular ‘they’ was the hot-button issue. The conversation flourished within conference rooms, along hallways, and across Twitter. It spilled into BuzzFeed and found its way into The Wall Street Journal and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications.”

In announcing the Post’s style change, Walsh commented, “I suspect that the singular they will go largely unnoticed even by those who oppose it on principle. We’ve used it before, if inadvertently, and I’ve never heard a complaint.”

So when you notice a singular they, or hopefully as a sentence adverb, in CEP, keep in mind this headline of a post on marketing firm Roundpeg’s blog: “Grammar rules change. Deal with it.”

For more fun with grammar, I hope you’ll join us and celebrate National Grammar Day on March 4.