this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
1068 points (96.8% liked)
Memes
45326 readers
3355 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We referring to teachers as "it" now?
Damn. Underpaid and dehumanized all at once. That's gotta be rough.
As a non-native speaker, referring to a single teacher as "they" is not very intuitive (although correct)...
I very much agree. Learning English as a foreign language, it feels very wrong to use plural for a single person. I'm still not quite used to it! Although, had I been taught that early on, I doubt it would feel any weirder than using "you are" for a single person.
And that's actually a pretty recent development. Less than a decade ago, I remember getting marked down in English class for using "they" as a genderless singular pronoun, as my elderly teacher grew up only ever using "they" to refer to a group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Your teacher was just one of those purists and it was never something with strong consensus for being wrong.
Shakespear used they as a singular iirc
And Chaucer split infinitives, but I was always told it was "wrong" in gradeschool. That's the problem with pedantry: language is a fascinatingly complex and beautiful set of patterns. Boiling it down to rules is at best a handy style guide for formal writing, but at worst it gets weaponed as a way to discriminate against people who use lower prestige dialects.
That's true, and there is evidence of "they" being used as a singular as far back as over 700 years ago, but only within the last few decades has it been formally accepted by style guides, like the APA or the Chicago Manual.