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

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

Given that as a precocious child Wilson was taught that he needed to "learn" that the usage in question "was redundant" 70 years ago, then clearly this is not a matter of "linguistic change" but at most simply one of competing norms. But of course, as someone else has pointed out, "refer back" is not necessarily redundant,  though in the indicated context it is somewhat over-restrictive, hence at worst better left out, since it literally expresses an idea that the author doubtless did not intend.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

-----Original Message-----
From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
Date:         Tue, 9 Mar 2010 03:32:41
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject:      Re: [ADS-L] Do's and don'ts for singular 'they'

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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