Using 'they' in place of 'he/she'

Try living in Central PA, where you have to battles of the two cities on the ends of the state…or worse yet, being someone who lived elsewhere who had to move into this mish-mash area :confounded:

Just a few of the loverly differences between the two ends of the state…

  1. Youse vs Yinz
  2. Hoagies vs Subs
  3. Soda vs Pop
  4. Iggles (Eagles) vs Stillers (Steelers)

I miss a good Hoagie and a real Philly Cheesesteak! It has been more than 20 years since I lived in-or-near Philly.

The one with Cheese Wiz? Ewwwwwwww… :mask:

The ABSOLUTE BEST CheeseSteak I have had ever, anywhere is in this little place behind Roxborough Hospital; Dalessandro’s.
They are only open for a short period over lunchtime and the line usually stretches out the door.

To anyone reading this, if you EVER visit the Philadelphia area you owe it to yourself to make a trip there. It is better than [the more well known] Pat’s Steaks in downtown!

Another Glasgow anomaly - they use “ginger” for a fizzy drink of any flavour.

There is a story of an Edinburgh lawer coming to work in Glasgow, and on her first day in court, a witness told her he’d “went oot tae the van fer cris’ an’ ginger” (translation - he’d gone out to the van to buy crisps (potato chips) and a fizzy drink), to which the lawyer replied “And are Chris and Ginger in court?” Brief interlude whilst Glasgow parlance was explained to the lawyer. (Glasgow and Edinburgh are only about 35 miles apart geographically, but wide apart in almost every other way. )

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In quite a few places in the southern US, all sodas are called Coke, whether you want a coke, sprite, diet, orange, etc. So a server will ask you what you want to drink, you reply “Coke” and they’ll say “What Kind?” Very confusing…

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“He” and “him” can mean ether gender and political correctness be damned. People who deliver mail are “postmen” and those that put out fires are “firemen”. They are not “postpersons” or “firepersons”. We really need to grow up and stop trying to be all things to all people.

How about “When a user logs on, it enters a username and password”. No gender there, could be a robot even.

I have seen it written down more times than I care to count, although more rarely in formal contexts (not never, though). Maybe it’s more of a British thing, to do with the way slack-jawed illiterates mumble their way through an approximation of the syllables in a UK accent, and that makes people more likely to think it’s “of” than in other accents.

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I don’t see what’s wrong with:

“When a user logs on, they enter a username and password”

That’s exactly how I would write that. I just don’t get the big deal. I’m almost anti-political correctness, but using “they” just seems to be more correct.

Not without extra punctuation. “Could have” or “should have” (or “would have”…) must be followed by a verb construct, which can include an adverb preceding the verb itself. Any other part of speech appearing there must be parenthetical to the main clause, typically surrounded by commas as Lesley said.

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Yes, but they should have been in inverted commas, because they are being used as titles and not words in their normal usage, so it doesn’t count.

I agree that it should be “they”. Check out these links, from Wikipedia and article on New Republic site.

Ann Fisher

The Royal They

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Great links, @liamcoded . I hadn’t found a usage in Shakespeare before, but was kind of hoping to. :slight_smile:

Of course there are a myriad of ways to circumvent this issue and restructure the sentence. E.g.

When a user logs on, they enter a username and password.

could be changed to

The user is logged on by entering a username or password

If you want some bad grammar read the bbc news website or the running updates along the bottom of the TV show. They often imply things that are completely wrong, by badly constructed sentences along the lines of

An investigation is underway after a child was found severely beaten by sussex police

So Sussex police have been beating up children? not what they wanted to say me thinks!

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Yes, it’s a shame that sites like the BBC and the Australian equivalent have lost touch with the spoken and written standards they once held so high. :frowning:

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Yes “they” is a plural noun so it would be wrong to use it with singular words like “user”. I often run into this problem when writing in English. In the past I kept using he/she and as you said, when you use it a couple of times in a paragraph it gets really awkward. In Turkish we don’t have a word for he or she, we just say “o” which can mean either he or she so when we say “o” people don’t know know the gender of the person we’re talking about. I wish we have something like that in English. Now I use plural words so that I can use the “they” pronoun to be more inclusive. I avoid using “she” as default because well…it comes off as discriminatory like using “he” all the time. I’m not an extreme feminist but it kind of bothers me when people keep using “he” all the time especially in job ads.

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It’s an interesting conundrum isn’t it? Saying he/she too much looks awkward, Same as “he or she” or “him or her” or whatever. “They” is grammatically incorrect. Saying only “he” or only “she” is implying discrimination. Alternating “he” in one paragraph and “she” in the next is just confusing. “It” is too object oriented rather than person oriented in English.

So…

Hmm.

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[quote=“peanar, post:78, topic:116525”]
In Turkish we don’t have a word for he or she, we just say “o” which can mean either he or she
[/quote]Perhaps we should all learn Turkish.

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Next month’s top story:

“In a surprise turn of events, originating at an online community called “Sitepoint.com”, the Internet has taken the world by storm, swapping the more common English and Chinese from common usage and replacing it with Turkish. While doing so, they’ve also struck down all laws limiting use of the Free Internet, and upheld Net Neutrality, banished all forms of prejudice and stereotypes and discrimination, and instantiated the first ever period of World Peace.”

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