7 Sep
2023
7 Sep
'23
11:12 p.m.
On Thursday 07 September 2023 15:32:58 deloptes via tde-users wrote:
Mike Bird via tde-users wrote:
> As to Deloptes original question, I am unclear as to whether they want to
Delopes is a he :) They are (if in one person) anomaly :)
It is unusual feeling being called they, even if I understand the
politeness in the background. I just want to say it is not necessary for
me.
Ah, you have got caught up in our culture wars. It is a pity that this stupid
non-question has become an obsession for so many people who take different
sides and evidently do not know at all anything about, say, linguistics or
the established etymologies of words.
I, too, get annoyed by this kind of misuse of language, which is a kind of
pretension to some "better knowledge"; but the funny thing is, practically
everybody is wrong on this matter.
The use of *they* as a kind of indeterminate form can be considered both right
and wrong, depending on one's point of view. It is used to be deliberately
non-specific, or maybe "polite" usage: neither male nor female, neither
singular nor plural, nor giving other indications about one's relations to
others (as one finds in languages other than English). I think maybe it's
because English lost the use of gender in language for ordinary words. I
don't hear about people debating whether, in other languages, a wall or a
house ought to be masculine or feminine, etc. That part of the culture wars
seems to be peculiarly an American phenomenon, or at least it is very much
anglocentric.
And yet, I must point out that the use of the words *they* and *them* in this
sort of indeterminate or "polite" sense is actually quite ancient, and can be
traced back a part of speech that was lost. There are traces of this, for
example, in French, as when one says "On dit" (They say), as in, "They say
it's going to rain sometime later today." Who is this "they"?
This seventh form or declension (not sure if my terms are correct here, as
it's been decades since university) dropped out of most Indo-European
languages sometime at the brink of the historical record. It used to exist (I
believe) in Old Irish and the other oldest European languages, but then
gradually disappeared.
Personally, I wish scholars, linguists, grammarians, makers of dictionaries,
politicians -- whoever it is that gets to decide these matters -- could get
it together, and come up with a kind of all-purpose, inclusive term (one that
doesn't offend anybody) to cover this problem of the "third gender" or third
sex; not to make any kind of political statement, but only because it is a
concept that is recognized in many cultures already, and can be found in our
own history, going back before the Classical period.
And then maybe we could all get back to living our lives again, instead of
fighting these stupid culture wars over things that aren't even real.
Just my opinion ...
Bill