Do's and don'ts for singular 'they'

[Wilson Gray]

Facebook uses _refer back_? Too bad. If I learned that _back_ is here
redundant at the age of three, I refuse to unlearn it at the age of
73. Language-change be damned!

-Wilson

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 1:17 PM, Gordon, Matthew J.
<GordonMJ at missouri.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Gordon, Matthew J." <GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Do's and don'ts for singular 'they'
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Facebook endorses your rule:
>
> "DO use they to refer back to an individual of unknown gender, or whose gender you do not wish to reveal."
>
> If a user doesn't specify their sex, FB refers to them with "singular they." I first noticed this in an ambiguous example, which I think are rare with singular they. A friend had posted a picture and the FB tag was "NAME has posted their picture of the day." I first interpreted this as referring to my friend and her family since it was a family picture.
>
> -Matt Gordon
>
>
>
> On 3/4/10 9:20 AM, "Neal Whitman" <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET> wrote:
>
> On Visual Thesaurus: What would school grammar textbooks say about 'they'
> with a singular antecedent if it hadn't suffered from 200 of stigmatization?
>
> http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/2193/
>
> Neal Whitman
> Email: nwhitman at ameritech.net
> Blog: http://literalminded.wordpress.com
>
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--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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