[Ads-l] The New Yorker Comma Queen on "they", part II

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun Apr 3 12:35:35 UTC 2016


Obviously a pronoun whose time has come, or already come and gone.  In today's Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/whos-they.html

Seems more like "Whose they?" than "Who's they?", since Hess argues here that adopting "they" as a gender-fluid pronoun is too easy:

“they” feels a little bit like a shortcut on the way to acceptance. It represents a third option outside the binary, sure. But it doesn’t compel people to make mental room for a new word"

So it's both too radical and not radical enough.

LH
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