E7 Blog: The Windows 7 Team

AndyC,

yea and what you're saying is reflected in how we talk about countries and ships as she. i have no problem with people using 'he' as the definite pronoun. im just pointing out that in many cases, 'they' actually works grammatically and is accepted use.

Actually I bet I could get grammar teachers to agree with me:) I think I saw the issue discussed somewhere.

I just noticed theres a wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they .

I'm sure not every language teacher would agree with me, but I'm sure many would. Also keep in mind that grammar really isn't from a rulebook but defined  by use. Some people abuse this concept to excuse really malformed grammar, but theres a logical and historical reason to say the singular they isn't a problem.

And then contrast linguists who want to accept any use of grammar to hardline people in rhetoric depts who have arbitrary hangups against things like passive tense--which is more ideological than people think; passive tense was the preferred style in the 19th century.

What I meant was that grammar is part of the language and anything written down as a rule is intended to describe how the language can be used to work. The same way that dictionary writers don't invent the meaning of words, grammar teachers don't invent the rules of grammar. The safest test of good grammar is whether something sounds right, not whether a teacher approves you. 

You'll see people abuse the logic I'm using, to say things like double negatives are perfectly OK. But its obvious that the reason we avoid double negatives is because they don't communicate things clearly, so we mark double negatives to be an inarticulate use. Other uses of language may be malformed or poorly formed. But, there's absolutely no reason to believe that 'they' can't cover the use I'm referring to; language isn't this inflexible thing where there can't be secondary uses for words. Just because they clearly refers to a plural in once case, doesn't mean it can't be adaptably used to refer to a singular in another case.

Passive tense refers to the verb tense, passive voice refers to the style of writing which uses the verb tense. And sometimes passive voice is more effective than active voice---passive voice can give more of a sense of objectivity because it distances the grammar from the writer. That's why it was popular in the 19th century. Today, its just a hangup for people with a certain mindset where they're biased to think speaking subjectively is preferable.

I'm not changing anything. I'm saying there's a reason 'they' sounds right. There isn't a moment in history where someone thought it was a bright idea to use 'they' and persuaded everyone else, it just works in language so people decided to use it. Telling people it doesn't work, when it does, isn't going to help anything.

Verb tenses:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/esl/esltensverb.html

They singular isn't breaking the rules just because someone says so. You can say its breaking the rules all you like but no person wrote the rules for English. If you want to have a conversation on that, lets have a conversation on that, instead of just saying there are rules. The fact that his/him are used for the indefinite pronoun, and she is used for personification, is a matter of convention, it doesn't say anything about English.

I did get a little confused about the active/passive tense issue for a moment because I haven't looked at grammatical terminology for a long time, but reviewing, I do know what they are and what the differences are.

The link I showed you does claim there are active tenses and passive tenses, it may be confused on that from a terminological perspective. You realize its just terminology right?