I trained myself to cross my z’s to disambiguate them from 2’s in equations, especially in exponents or complicated fractional expressions. The crossed 7 was an unintentional side-effect.
We would write “If someone does enough acid they are considered legally insane” (or “…they would be considered”, etcetera), and our teachers would praise us, our newspapers emulate us, and our legislators stamp it so.
So not only is “they” a singular pronoun, “are” is a singular verb. Lovely. Makes me kinda moist-eyed.
To be fair, ‘are’ is a singular verb when used with ‘you’
But I still think using ‘they’ as a singular pronoun is ridiculuous. Yes, it’s indefinite, but singular? Whatever.
My point was that we shouldn’t be making a big deal out of this kind of thing anyway, and yet here we are.
Which is a good reason I should get used to it. ‘You’ used to be the plural of ‘thou’, which is why it mates with ‘are’ (Ignoring the formality issue). We lost ‘thou’, and got the weird ‘are’ as a singular. The thing with ‘they’ is probably pretty much the same thing.
I don’t have to like it, though.
French class in 9th grade… cross the 7’s and the Z’s…done it ever since.
That’s probably where I got it from in all likelihood.
I never cross my sevens, because I don’t draw a little cape on my ones. It’s easy to tell them apart if you go no-frills all the way.
Well, it’s evolution of the English language in progress. Using “it” as a singular pronoun refering to a person does not seem to have happened. Nobody has proposed a new word for “his/her” that has caught on. “They” being converted to singular usage is becoming more common.
Most serious written works I read still use ‘his’, occasionally you see ‘her’ used throughout. I still use ‘his’ in speech, but I agree that’s getting rare.
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Yeah, well ‘His’ doesn’t work as a neutral pronoun because, guess what? It’s not neutral :p
A person cannot help their birth. — Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 1848
You said “third grade” and that’s the key, I think.
When you’re a little kid you think the weirdest things are cool. All it takes is one other kid who at all seems cool or interesting to the peergroup to do something a bit distinctive, and it spreads like wildfire. I’m sure that’s where I first saw a 7 with a slash, some girl using it as handwriting frill in grade school. I can easily imagine the slashed-7 as a special meme peculiar to 3rd-graders that has been propagating for decades from grade to grade.
I use “you” as much as I can to avoid the whole sexed pronoun issue entirely. You are whatever sex that you are.
Very true. I print in smallcaps because I had a teacher who would write that way on his blackboard, and I thought it was the coolest, most readable handwriting ever.
‘His’ is indeed the neutral pronoun, even though the injustice that it’s also the male pronoun makes people sad. The male pronoun is also the neutral pronoun in Hebrew, and I think German and Spanish, too.
And, a quote for a quote.
Only meant males, of course.
However, with the no-frills approach, there is an issue telling apart 2’s and z’s, especially in equations with heavily nested structure. One must either put a curlicue on the 2 or cross the z. I tried to learn both methods, but the crossed z was the one that stuck. ObTopic: I acquired the crossed 7 as a side effect of my quest for the crossed z.
This is awesome! I feel so validated by the rest of you cretins that I think I’m going to start crossing my sevens again!
Wooot!
Well, finally, among all the videocard-this and overclocked-that, a subject I know something about. ;)
The central argument against generic masculine words is that they do not work. A generic term is a catagory term or hyponym. It is meant to refer to all members of a class. ‘Generic’ and ‘gender’ both derive from Latin ‘genus’ meaning a kind or a type. Thus, ‘furniture’ is a generic term for the hyponyms ‘tables, chairs, beds and desks’; ‘animals’ is a generic term for ‘fish, mammals and reptiles’, and ‘car’ is a generic term for ‘Jaguars, Fords, Toyotas and Volvos’. To assess how poor ‘man’ is a generic for human species, let us see how well it compares with the other generics mentioned:
*Furniture: chair, bed, table, desk
A chair is a piece of furniture.
I’d like some new furniture, especially a desk.
I’d like a new bed. Let’s go furniture shopping.
*Animals: fish, mammals, birds
Humans are often carnivores; they eat all kinds of animals, including fish and birds.
Of all the animals, I like cute mammals the best.
*Cars: Jaguar, Ford, Toyota, Volvo
I have a Ford but if I could afford it I’d buy a more expensive car like a Jaguar.
Japanese cars like Toyotas are very popular second-hand cars to buy in Ireland and Britain.
All these generics work well, since each one can stand for any of the sub-group or ‘hyponyms’.
*Man: woman, man, girl, boy
?A man is a man.
?Girls and boys are man/men.
?Half of all men are women.
And what about these peculiar inventions?
?Every man experiences his menstruation differently.
?Man, being a mammal, breastfeeds his young.
?Man, when pregnant, experiences food cravings.
?Man, unlike lower mammals, has trouble giving birth.
Clearly, the problem which arises in terms of our mental imagery is that the one word, ‘man’, has a specific meaning which is activated in our memory before, simultaneously, or just after the generic meaning arises, causing the ‘generic’ to call up male imagery, in other words, to fail as a generic.
My handwriting is bad enough that I had to start crossing my sevens because people confused them with my ones, twos, and possibly nines as well. So now that I cross them, they ask me, “What the hell is that?” instead of silently getting it wrong.
Thank God for computers. Or Al Gore, or whoever is responsible.
Geoff
I don’t think your examples address the historical use of the male pronoun as a gender-indeterminate pronoun. Rather they adress the use of the word “man” to cover the human race, and why everyone who has used it that was for the last 500 years has been wrong.
You try to show this using examples that are female-specific, which would be just as weird if you used the word “deer” instead of “man”.
The change from “his” to “their” is a political one, it is a conscious feminist reshaping of the language. People aren’t confused by “his” as a gender-neutral pronoun, and only in the US are they offended.