For a nation obsessed with sex, only one grouping of the six pronouns in the English language identifies gender: it/she/he.
A problem with these third-person singular pronouns arises when you need to use one of them to refer back to an indefinite pronoun such as anyone, everybody, everyone, no one or someone. Are those words male or female? They could be one or the other or both, so the issue gets sidestepped and you hear or read sentences like:
Everyone knows they shouldn’t pet a sleeping crocodile.
Does that look correct to you? Yes? Well, slow down there, chief. According to tightly puckered sources like the The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, because everyone is singular, it requires the singular he or she:
Everyone knows he shouldn’t pet a sleeping crocodile.
The Times brings up a good point about not using a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent; strictly speaking, if that “Everyone knows they” sentence is correct, then so is this glue-sniffing Gollum construction:
As I write my blog, we cry sometimes.
Yet it’s not as easy a fix as the Gray Lady suggests. “What about me?” a woman may rightly ask. “I’m smart enough to let sleeping crocodiles lie!” It’s this cry that birthed the following construction, one “solution” to this debate that everyone agrees sucks:
Everyone knows he or she shouldn’t pet a sleeping crocodile.
It has the potential to worsen the longer the sentence gets:
Everyone knows he or she shouldn’t pet a sleeping crocodile because he or she could get his or her hand snapped clean off.
So what to do? On the far right, we have the possibly sexist but more likely ultra-parental it’s-correct-because-we-say-so solution of The New York Times. Remember too that this is a publication that continues to insist on printing “courtesy” titles with surnames after first references: “Ms. Goodall insisted chimpanzees are her specialty and could not offer advice on petting sleeping crocodiles.”
On the far left, we have folks like Richard Lederer, a learned and respected linguist who nonetheless appears on his website wearing a tuxedo and a jester’s hat. He would have no problem with that first crocodile sentence, arguing that we’ve been using the singular-pronoun-plus-they construction since at least Chaucer. And because most everyone still speaks that way, he adds, it’s grammatically correct.
This stance ignores some facts. In Chaucer’s day, there weren’t even commonly accepted rules for spelling much less grammar. Also, as you may have noticed, even people as important as our president seem to have a weak grasp of the English language. Perhaps we the people shouldn’t be considered automatic arbiters or experts of what’s grammatically correct.
A workaround suggested almost as an afterthought by both the Times and Lederer camps is my preferred way to resolve this problem: reword the sentence, you lazy bastard. In general, why not one of these:
Don’t pet sleeping crocodiles.
It’s unwise to pet sleeping crocodiles.
Everyone knows not to pet sleeping crocodiles.
Rewording doesn’t work in all cases, but I can live with that as long as I’m still doing my part to help prevent senseless lady-offendings and crocodile maulings.