bout a decade ago, I attended an afternoon conclave in the college English department where I teach. The topic was “grading practices,” the goal to improve consistency in the marks given to freshmen — always a worthy aim, but perennially frustrated by bureaucratic and popular resistance. The Comp Committee provided copies of corrected papers that had recently been handed back in English 1001, with the names of student authors and the correcting instructors blanked out. The rest of us sat around a big conference table reviewing the facsimiles, commenting on what we might have done differently or likewise.
At length we came to a paper that had received a lengthy comment on a sentence something like the following:
Anyone who values their democratic freedoms should vote for the candidate of their choice.
The instructor had commented on the unpromisingly trite content, but left the sentence otherwise unscathed. This was disconcerting. The sentence sat there on the page, staring back at us, with an expression that seemed to grow accusing. Finally someone took the plunge: “Well, isn’t there an agreement error here that should be circled? I mean, ‘Anyone-their’ — that’s still considered incorrect, right?”
There was an uncomfortable pause. “Well, yes,” someone finally ventured. “Of course, the language appears to be changing in that regard. Using they and them and their with singular antecedents is already quite common in speech. There’s even a body of opinion that considers it correct in writing.”
“Ri-i-ight,” said several voices. It’s always nice to hear about bodies of opinion. Any number can be admitted, and you never have to choose.
Someone else said, “It’s better than his in a supposedly generic sense. That’s sexist, period.” After a moment he added softly, “’Anyone-their’ is fine.”
“Well, I still find it awkward,” said someone who may have been me. “Could you, perhaps, balance a few generic he’s with generic she’s — you know?”
“His or her,” suggested someone.
“Awkward,” someone else said sorrowfully, shaking her or his head. “I mean, twice in one short sentence?”
“Recast the whole sentence in the plural,” a new voice chimed in. “’People who value their democratic freedoms’ and so on.” She was probably right, or at least more right than the rest of us, and was consequently ignored.
Unhappy now, the instructor who had spoken first appealed to the room: “Well, give me some guidance. When I come across this kind of sentence, do I mark it or not?”
“Yes,” said half the room.
“No,” said the other half.
A slightly uncomfortable silence. Then someone suggested, “You know, we could just mark it wrong whichever way they do it.”
The laugh got us past that moment, but not past the problem. Pronouns, these days, are a source of chronic dispute and some bitterness. Specifically, what raises hackles and throws authority into disrepute is the question of using they / them / their rather than he / him / his or she / her/ hers after indefinite pronouns and universalized nouns. In a brief, disorderly survey of my pretty big collection of college writing handbooks, I find no explicit warrant for “singular they” or its analogs. The rule given is always some version of the traditional one:
Make sure that a pronoun and its antecedent agree in number, in person, and in gender. . . . Use a singular pronoun to refer to a singular indefinite pronoun, or reword the sentence. (H14)
By this rule, sentences like “Someone lost their copy of Playboy” and “The average voter believes their husband has the right idea” will continue to get the axe in freshman composition. “Everyone got their coats” may feel a touch more grammatical than “Everyone got their coat,” with “Everyone got their shoes” somewhere in between, but all are equally guilty in the eyes of the law. When the student writes, “An American under attack by foreign nationals expects the U.S. government to help them,” the appropriate handbook section will be noted in the margin, in red capitals.
But now turn to R.W. Burchfield’s discussion of singular-plural pairings in his redaction of Fowler’s Modern English Usage:
. . . traditional grammarians aside, such constructions are hardly noticed any more or are not widely felt to lie in a prohibited zone. Fowler (1926) disliked the practice . . . [but] the OED points in another direction altogether. From the 16th century onward, they has often been ‘used in reference to a singular noun [or pronoun] made universal by every, any, no, etc., or applicable to one of either sex (= “he or she”). All such ‘non-grammatical’ constructions arise either because the notion of plurality resides in many of the indefinite pronouns or because of the absence in English of a common-gender third person singular pronoun (as distinct from his used to mean ‘his or her’ or the clumsy use of his or her itself) (779).
That “body of opinion” my colleague invoked in the meeting long ago certainly does exist. Google “singular they” and you will find that it seems to have swept away all resistance. Endorsements of the handbook position are few and halfhearted, while post after post defends the alleged solecism as useful, clear, necessary, and well-established in both literary and spoken English. Jjoan Altieri’s influential Vocabula article of September 2003, “Singular They: The Pronoun that Came in from the Cold,” makes the case especially well, presenting a history of the controversy (though of this more in a moment), offering numerous examples of the usage in writings from the sixteenth century to the present. Typical of such discussions is a tone of gleeful sans-culottism that can grow petulant. Bloggers abuse traditionalists as “curmudgeonly pedants,” “puristic pusillanimous pontificators,” and so on. Apparently the best motive that can be attributed to old-style grammarians is that of defending gender and class privilege; the worst motives are malice and spleen. The idea that at least some of them might be helpful, undogmatic guides through difficulties they did not invent is nowhere entertained.
How is it that so few handbooks even suggest that a controversy exists over singular they / them / their? The omission seems especially glaring in that the guides all scramble to embrace the relatively new injunction against generic he, thus eliminating what had formerly been the chief alternative to singular they. The freshperson of 2005 has a tougher time in this respect than the freshman of 1950; the advice of the best authorities puts her in a double bind. In my collection, only the 1988 Prentice Hall Handbook for Writers suggests singular they as a possible strategy for “avoiding sexism in pronoun references,” though its guideline 8C quickly adds that the usage “is regarded by many people as a grammatical error when it appears in writing” (83). Indeed, these people must include whoever wrote guideline 8B, two pages earlier, which insists on traditional consistency of number. But the Prentice Hall at least tries to alert the student to the terrors that lurk ahead; and it is forthright enough to admit, “Each of these alternatives has drawbacks.” By contrast the other handbooks seem, in their misplaced confidence, a bit disingenuous. Instead of “teaching the controversy,” they pile new dogma on old and make no effort to sort out contradictions.
Like other avant-gardistes, supporters of singular they have a bracing confidence that the future is theirs, often expressing impatience to get there as soon as possible. Language change is as hard to forecast as next year’s weather, but for what it’s worth, I share this sense that third person plural-singular is gaining ground. Among specimens I have collected recently is this one, from the online table of contents for the New York Times of November 27, 2005:
The next Warren Buffett or Bill Gates might be sitting in a classroom somewhere waiting for someone to teach them the meaning of a grand slam.
And this one, from a memo by my university’s Associate Dean of Education:
There are 4 versions of the Assessment of Professional Teaching (APT), and the version a candidate takes is based on the certificate they are seeking.
And this one, from our Faculty Senate’s call for nominations for a service award:
The nominee should exemplify the dedication of Dr. Luis Clay Mendez by their service to the University, their profession, and the community at large .
And this one, from the Vocabula Review of July, 2005:
. . .the average citizen cannot connect the need for more treatment of "substance use disorders" to their uncle the alcoholic.
And this one, from my own essay in a newly arrived copy of Vocabula Bound Quarterly:
When I was a kid . . . you weren’t supposed to ask anyone how they felt about classic works of literature.
And the following strange bit of gabble, in a memo to instructors from our Composition Committee (!), which goes pretty badly off the rails trying to affirm both singular them and the him or her that even the eighteenth century disliked:
Since the student will need to change sentences completely to make the necessary global changes suggested, asking him or her to correct sentences already in place will confuse them and, perhaps, entice them to change only the punctuation and spelling rather than to address content issues.
But do such examples, or any examples, really clinch the argument? Nothing really proves that they are not “exceptions to the rule” or outright solecisms. By the same token, Altieri’s fascinating anthology of famous authors caught in the act using singular they shows that the singular plural can be done well; it does not prove that it is generally unexceptionable or that it was ever the dominant paradigm.
In attempts to address synchronic questions of usage — what is acceptable or desirable or intelligible right now — appeals to the diachronic, to history past or future, can be misleading. Like the Bible, Shakespeare can be quoted to justify all kinds of usages, but what was right for him is not necessarily right for you, unless you cry “Zounds!” whenever you race a yellow light. Arguments that appeal to an imaginary future as if it were certain and settled, as Marxism used to, are still more suspect. Even if we could know that ain’t will become acceptable in writing as of January 6, 2030, that would be no reason for adopting it now (indeed, doing so would defeat the prophesy). In the case of singular they, the historical persistence of the usage can be an argument contra not pro, inviting one to tell its proponents, “We tried that already.” If the singular plural was always there, handy and clear and practical, why did educated usage move away from it?
Altieri offers a historical explanation that to me sounds unconvincing. Once upon a time, language development was “normal,” and no one picked on anyone else’s usage. Then some bad old grammarians, hearts seething with greed and sexism, came along and spoiled everything:
The grammarians of eighteenth-century England may not have been the first to try to stay the normal course of language development, but they certainly were among the most successful. They seem to have purposefully narrowed the original definition of they by tossing out its singular referents and by proscribing expressions such as him or her and he or she, deeming these constructions ungainly. . . . grammarians such as Wilson, Poole, Kirby, and others — all males —. . . ardently campaigned for the supremacy of the masculine gender.
By rejecting singular they and other forms of common speech, those already in power were able to preserve the status quo of class privilege as well as male dominance.
. . . they proscribed singular they and embraced not-so-generic he.
But of course we are all grammarians, fiercely partial to our own ways of stringing words together, and no formal grammar would be heeded if experience and intuition did not often confirm its rules. I do not doubt that early grammarians shared and unconsciously followed the gender views of their day. But their chief concern would necessarily have been with their professed agenda: that of instructing a newly literate public in the special exigencies of written language. If they advocated tighter rules for pronoun reference, that is because in written language everything must be tighter: vocabulary, structure, cadence. Prescriptivists did not invent generic he, but they did prefer it, as what seemed a handy and harmless way of averting confusion; nor was it an entirely artificial usage. As Stephen Nagle et al point out, “Singular they is well established in vernacular English, but generic he also is at home in non-self-conscious colloquial usage” (67). There is some truth to the descriptivist’s complaint that prescriptive rules tend to become self-perpetuating shibboleths; but for the most part, rules that survive have some kind of organic justification and have proved modestly useful — the most that can really be asked of such rules.
2
After reading Altieri’s essay in January 2003, I began compiling an anthology of my own, partly in a spirit of reconsidering my own essay-marking practices. When I came across a student sentence that seemed to have pronoun-reference problems, I made a copy, time permitting. I tried not to impose the traditional rules automatically, but to be true to my actual reading experience, selecting sentences that really did oblige me to re-read, or at least struck me as distractingly awkward. I present the results of this very unscientific investigation as an appendix, though with a caveat: I am a trained professional, and reading student prose is no big deal for me. You, though, if you are as old as I am, should probably consult a physician before reading the list straight through. If at any point you experience chest pain, dizziness, or shortness of breath, stop immediately and drink a glass of water.
Two lists, then: Altieri’s careful dossier of graceful singular plurals by real authors, and my casual collection of graceless ones by students. What can we learn by comparing the two? The clearest lesson from my list would seem to be that I am a die-hard traditionalist: singular they still trips me up, over and over. But am I really alone in finding these sentences awkward, annoying, wrong? Judge for yourself. The more relevant point would seem to be one that writers know very well already: writing is art, not science. The rules exist for excellent reasons, but they are hit-or-miss constructs, made to be bent, and what really matters is skill, not mere correctness however defined; for the iffy precepts in your handbook are always affected by extraneous factors.
Take diction. Ostensibly it is a completely separate issue from agreement, but in practice a folksy phrase, a contraction or two, can render a nearby singular plural more intelligible, by signaling the reader to be on the alert for colloquialism. Or take sentence length. The great majority of Altieri’s examples are very short, for the simple and excellent reason that the more complex the sentence, the more likely the plural-singular ambiguity is to cause trouble. Thus no problem at all is caused by a teacher’s spoken “Everyone get back to their seats” or Shakespeare’s “God send every one their heart’s desire.” My students, by contrast, wander into mazes like the following:
51. Because of the violence in these fairy tales, children have an escape to their problems while watching someone else, through their imagination, conquer their problems.
— wherein “children” and “someone else” compete for the attention of two their’s that come trailing up near the end. (Matters are not helped, of course, by the hovering presence of a third their and “escape to” where “escape from” is intended.) But in mature writing most sentences are long, and need to be — so the lesson here would seem to be that the traditional agreement rule has considerable validity.
A usage that is truly unexceptionable ought not to pall with repetition, yet in all but one of the literary examples given by Altieri, singular they occurs just once, as if indeed it were a special exception rather than a routine choice. In my students’ writing, by contrast, the singular plurals frequently recur, with what to me is an effect of worsening awkwardness:
4. A child who reads this fairy tale will take from it that in order for him or herself to become a ‘grownup,’ they must first prove that, as children, they can be stronger than adults are and then the child must use their wits to prove their intellectual value. (2/7/04)
Pressed to mute such iterations, many students follow the Composition Committee in treating singular they as interchangeable with he or she, ending up with sentences that probably sound splendid after fifteen revisions have completely dulled the ear:
57. For example, when a young adult is stressed about his or her life, he or she might wonder what it would be like if they were a fish in an aquarium, because they would not have to worry about anything and they could swim all day. (4/21/05)
Again, in Altieri’s anthology a high proportion of antecedents are indefinite pronouns, and a high proportion of these are negatives; in mine, universalized nouns are everywhere prominent. The reason, I take it, is that “the notion of plurality resides in many of the indefinite pronouns,” as Burchfield says — and especially in the negative ones. Other things being equal, no one will work better as an antecedent to singular they than someone, and either of these is better than a universalized noun. But if you insist on a universalized noun, those modified by any, every, and all will work better than those preceded by a or the, while those tugged onstage by each are non-starters.
My students wrote their essays in a children’s literature course, so their paragraphs swarm with phantom figures called the child and the concerned adult and so on. Often the “notion of plurality” is clearly there, but the definite or indefinite article insists on a singular sense, and for me at least, an ensuing singular plural invariably registers as a solecism.
1. Laura’s thoughts and actions are typical of any six year-old, so a child can easily associate their problems with hers. (2/7/04)
8. In fact, the reader may be so involved in the novel that they do not realize they are being taught a moral lesson.
The pattern is so consistent that I am moved to create my very own pronoun rule:
8K: If your antecedent is a noun preceded by a or the or (Heaven knows) each, try to obey 8B, avoiding singular they / them / their.
The problem tends to grow worse when the noun is further particularized by modification or predication, making the hypothetical construct more vivid and hence more singular:
3. the child does not really pay attention to many words in the rhyme but they hear their name and the rolling of their arms is fun for them.
39. Once a child has learned their alphabet and has an understanding of simple stories, they can appreciate rhymes that are increasingly more complicated.
Altieri’s collection furnishes counter-examples, of course, but rather few, and none quite sufficient to defeat my legislative zeal. One from Shakespeare is so old that I plead the statute of limitations:
There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me,
As if I were their well-acquainted friend
A much more recent example, from Doris Lessing, is a sentence so exquisitely turned that I would call it a rare triumph of art over rule, hence an unreliable paradigm, though that is probably bent logic:
And how easy the way a man or woman would come in here, glance around, find smiles and pleasant looks waiting for them, then wave and sit down by themselves.
The progress from singular (but barely singular) “man or woman” to “themselves” is so gentle and deft that no one objects when the chair, at the end, gets taken by a hermaphrodite.
Another notably artful example, borrowed from the OED, is from Fielding’s Tom Jones:
Every Body fell a laughing, as how could they help it.
Why does it feel so perfectly natural? To begin with, “everybody” in this kind of narrative context — a definite place and moment, a specific group of people, an action — is a rather different creature from the same word in an abstract proposition like “Everybody believes their own religion.” That shadowy agent might be one or many; here the meaning skews strongly plural: these people, right here, bursting into laughter together. The emphatic spelling and initial position of the pronoun further strengthen this plural sense — Just everybody! Without exception! — while a quiet caesura disjoins the two clauses, helping “they” to refer less to the pronoun than directly to the guests themselves. Finally, the strong spondaic rhythm of “how could” (//), in itself a pleasing echo of the two-beat “Every Body” (/u /u), helps de-emphasize “they,” so that it skips home more easily.
Or, quite possibly, I have lost my mind from staring at these examples too long. But it does seem that a remarkable range of supposedly extraneous factors helps to determine whether, in a given case, the singular-plural shift succeeds or not.
Even so, we need good and reasonable prescriptive rules, much as we need good and reasonable maps, though both will omit much more than they include. Do we have them, where pronouns are concerned? Not really. Taken too much to heart, the typical handbook chapter becomes a real Catch-22. You are advised to avoid generic he; to avoid singular they / their / them; to avoid he or she, him or her, his or her; to abstain completely from s/he and his/her; to avoid you as excessively informal. The mess of pottage offered in exchange consists of a few weak strategies such as pluralizing your construction (at bitter cost to emphasis and clarity, in many a sentence), avoiding pronouns altogether, or, vaguely, “rewording the sentence” (Well, duh!). Meanwhile thought limps along painfully, strangely hobbled in its ability to express complex relationships and abstract propositions.
But the situation is not the fault of the handbook writers, or of anyone as far as I can see. The culture, just now, is in a phase of uncertainty on the issue, a temporary sojourn in pronoun hell. What is needed is a little less dogmatism all around, a change not so much in our guidelines as in how we view them. Traditionalists like me need to quit circling singular they / them / their every time they see it. Insurgents need to quit insisting that the usage is the new standard and that anyone who sees problems must wear steel underwear. Snobs need to quit speaking as if a person’s socio-economic background and educational level could be inferred from a single pronoun choice in a tight corner of a difficult paragraph. Ideologues must cease their distracting habit of trying to infer the writer’s politics in the same way.
Which is basically to conclude with a thundering truism: concentrate on what is being said, not how.
3
With that alacrity they have for prohibiting what they might not be able to replace, my handbooks all enthusiastically agree in proscribing generic he. Their confidence on this point is surprising, given that the usage continues to be common in both speech and writing, and that it is such a handy fix (offensiveness aside) for the basic structural problem. But the linguistic arguments against the old Victorian standby are strong. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, an authoritative, 1842-page guide, gives a crisp rendering of current orthodoxy:
The fact that the primary meaning of he contains the component “male” makes it an unsatisfactory pronoun for use in a secondary sense that covers females as well as males. Use of the male term to subsume females is a form of linguistic inequality that can be seen as related to and tending to reinforce social inequality (492).
Implications of this position are spelled out in an August, 2004 posting to the Language Log site by Geoffrey Pullum, one of the guide’s two editors. “He is never generic, i.e. sex-neutral,” says Pullum, arguing that if it were, we would say things like, “Either the husband or the wife has perjured himself” and “Was it your father or your mother who broke his leg on a ski trip?” In sum,
Anyone who thinks the word he has a sex-neutral use is kidding themself [sic]. When someone says The person chosen as provost will need to know his stuff, they are talking as if the person chosen as the new provost will be a man. If you're not assuming that, don't use he.
Pullum’s choice of “themself” will persuade some that singular they is a pretty slippery slope after all. But the wisdom of the hour is clearly that generic he not only can be sexist but that it must be, always has been, always will be.
I find this judgment at best a tad too sweeping and Platonic, aloof from the contingencies of actual usage. Language is never a self-contained logical system. In practice, in social contexts, words get skewed by context, creative spin, implicit intention, and special convention and end up meaning all kinds of things they have no logical right to mean. We say she’s having a baby, rejecting more precise verbs like birth and deliver, but no one gets confused, and the less meaningful choice is somehow better. We say could care less (in downstate Illinois at least), which seems to be the opposite of what we mean — but everyone nods. Bored, the teen subculture decides to see if it can use “bad” and “phat” to mean “good,” and for a time that special convention functions perfectly well.
A prime instance of such idiomatic warping is here on the handbook page we already have open. How is it that the long-disliked he or she and its analogs have emerged as correctives to the male bias of generic he? The recommissioned phrases make the priority of the male quite explicit, and thus are logically more sexist than generic he, not less. Recalcitrants have argued that apparently dealbreaking point for decades, but have never gained any traction — because, somehow, the argument is just wrong. Everyone who hears or reads he or she understands that the point is, “Look, I’m including women here,” — never the opposite. But that meaning cannot be derived from the phrase itself; it comes from the social context, from one’s awareness that generic he has been objected to and here is an attempted correction. The phrase means what it means because we have agreed that it shall mean that — logic be damned, more or less. Handbooks warn that the he or she pattern is awkward, and of course it is — when it is robotically iterated. What the handbooks should say is that the true use of he or she is prophylactic. Use it once early on, in a short sentence, and your piece is vaccinated against the suspicion of sexism. The very awkwardness of the idiom does you good service, by calling attention to the gesture you are making, and the reader will thereafter place a kindlier construction on your words, even permitting you a generic he or two if you get into a jam.
And if that happens, you have done pretty much what the eighteenth century grammarians did: established generic he as a special convention, illogical but at least clear to everyone, to cover a case where the language is deficient to your purposes. Current academic opinion encourages us to see our ancestors as entrapped and blinded by their own usages. I think we owe them more credit: they were capable of using generic he without taking it literally; they could see through it to the realities beyond, and probably knew that women existed.
So, then, why not she or he? Try the phrase aloud, along with the analogs her or him, hers or his, herself or himself, and you feel considerable awkwardness. The problem seems to be that English “wants” high-back vowels to come before low-front vowels, as in expressions like ping-pong, dilly-dally, tit for tat, slip and slide, bitch and moan, and so on, a preference strong and consistent enough that phonologists call it a rule. Invoking such factors would probably look like outrageous cheating to those who find the pronoun question politically urgent and want meaning alone to dictate. But here we are: the tongue just won’t do what the brain commands, and she or he goes into the same bin as the unpronounceable s/he.
Clear in any case is that a special convention defends he or she from implying male supremacy; and that a similar convention once defended generic he, and still does for many people — perhaps a majority of those over 50. We geezers just don’t hear quite what you sprouts do, or if we do, we un-hear it instantly.
he case against “sexist usage” (we need a less stinging term) was made brilliantly, and with more common sense and good humor than are always remembered, in works like Casey Miller and Kate Swift’s Words and Women (1976). But one result of such arguments was, for a time, terribly ironic. A grim self-consciousness gripped academic discourse, often afflicting women as badly as men. All those old constructions and expressions that had been shown to be a bit sexist now became much more so: dreadfully sexist, expressly sexist. Generic he did not merely become undesirable; it became radioactive. You used it at peril of implying a wholesale rejection of the whole feminist platform; and so with a disconcertingly large family of words and phrases like maneater, fireman, man the hatches, and so on. Worse, anyone who had written before 1970 or so began to sound, to the young especially, like a dupe of patriarchy. You revisited Virginia Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft and discovered to your shock that they had always been male supremacists.
Lately, though, we seem to have recovered our equilibrium rather nicely. Generic he seems to be making a quiet partial comeback in academic writing, reporting for work in the cubicle next door to newly-hired generic she. Those who can use the old construction most easily, of course, are women writers, especially professed feminists; and why not? In their case, no one will mistakenly infer a male-supremacist outlook from the resort to an efficient phrase in a sentence that is talking about something else.
Most of my students are women, many on their way to becoming elementary school teachers, the rest to joining other careers that are open to college graduates. Would they have benefited from a traditionalist approach to pronouns, unabashedly directing them to use he for all indeterminate cases? They would probably have suffered less of the particular agony documented on my list, where sentence after sentence chokes to death in a fit of indecision about pronoun choice. Would such instruction have undermined my students’ self-esteem, darkly insinuating that they should be more passive, inconspicuous, unambitious, invisible? Well, maybe; but I think most of them would know not to take generic he so literally. They could avail themselves of its undisputed convenience without for a moment accepting its smug little assumption of male priority. The old Whorf-Sapir-Orwell view that language determines thought rather than vice versa remains one of the favorite superstitions of the educated. What really disrespects my students more, I wonder: the centuries of male bias still embedded in the language, or the fear that they will be powerless to resist?
Let’s cut a deal. You avoid singular they, and I will avoid generic he. But that indispensable term “avoid” means both “Don’t do it” and “Do it if you must.”
References
Altieri, Jjoan Taber. “Singular They: The Pronoun That Came in From the Cold.” Vocabula Review, January, 2003. www.vocabula.com. Found 22 January 2003.
Axelrod, Rise B., and Charles R. Cooper. The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing. Boston: Bedford / St. Martins’, 2001.
Burchfield, R.W. The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 3rd ed., revised. First ed. by H.W. Fowler. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.
Huddleston, Rodney D., and Geoffrey K. Pullum. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Leggett, Glen, et al. Prentice Hall Handbook for Writers, 10th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988.
Miller, Casey and Kate Swift. Words and Women. New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1976.
Nagle, Stephen J., Margaret A. Fain, Sara L. Sanders, “What Is Political Correctness Doing To The English Language?” View[z], Vienna English Working Papers 7:2 (December, 1998): 56-69.
Pullum, Geoffrey. Language Log: Canada Supreme Court Gets the Grammar Right. August 14, 2004. Found 31 December 2005.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001362.html
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Appendix: Specimen Sentences
1. Laura’s thoughts and actions are typical of any six year-old, so a child can easily associate their problems with hers. (2/7/04)
2. Any child can easily relate to this type of situation. Either they are still thinking about complaints, or can be heard grumbling to themselves when told not to do something. (2/7/04)
3. The child does not really pay attention to many words in the rhyme but they hear their name and the rolling of their arms is fun for them. (2/7/04)
4. A child who reads this fairy tale will take from it that in order for him or herself to become a ‘grownup,’ they must first prove that, as children, they can be stronger than adults are and then the child must use their wits to prove their intellectual value. (2/7/04)
5. Should the adult not read certain poems because the they [sic] think it might be too violent? (2/7/04)
6. This poem lets the child’s imagination flow, allowing them to imagine that a child does have some say in what goes on at home. (2/7/04)
7. So, for a poem to show that the children are in control, allows the child to use their imagination. The child might laugh at the fact that they live in the shoe or wish about having so many brothers and sisters to play with. They are able to dream about what those bad children are doing that would make the mother need to whip them. It again makes the child think that he will have some power over the parent in the relationship. It might also be calming for the child to hear that he is not the only child being reprimanded by a parent. (2/7/04)
8. In fact, the reader may be so involved in the novel that they do not realize they are being taught a moral lesson. (2/7/04)
9. The parent can change the tone of the rhyme just by changing the pitch, tone, or volume of their voice. (2/7/04)
10. Since it is simple you can involve the child while still entertaining them, which in turn keeps the child’s attention, so they learn while enjoying a simple nursery rhyme.
11. As the child becomes a little older they find movement rhymes more entertaining.
12. Now that the child has learned their alphabet and has an understanding of simple stories, they can appreciate rhymes that are more complicated. (2/7/04)
13. For example, when a child is hungry, they may cry, “I’m starving!” (2/7/04)
14. A child may view this character as any person in their life that they feel pokes fun at them for not understanding things or maybe simply someone they find makes no sense or is contradictory to the knowledge they have acquired thus far. (2/7/04)
15. For Alice and many children I’m sure that although they seem to respect the knowledge and authority of an educator, they still misinterpret or do not understand some of what they teach. (2/7/04)
16. This will spark a child’s interest and amazement because they have so many questions and their fascinated that they may not have a full understanding of the language.
17. They favor these helpless, weak, and misfortunate animals because as a child they too often feel weak, helpless, misfortunate, and have no say in their lives. (2/7/04)
18. It was socially mandatory for a man to not be emotional and express their feelings, to keep it to themselves. (2/7/04)
19. The best of both worlds for a child might make them more rounded and may reduce the amount of stress in their lives. (2/7/04)
20. For instance, if a child breaks something and the parent punishes them by sending them to their room, that may not make sense to a child, much in the way the Queen’s punishment did not make sense to Alice. (2/7/04)
21. No child is born ready to discriminate, they learn from elders and society. (2/7/04)
22. During this time a child can become very insecure and angry if their parents are not careful, they can even question their purpose in life. (2/7/04)
23. Since an older sibling can feel left out and alone during this stage, it is good for them to know that these feelings are normal. (2/7/04)
24. Knowing that a certain poem is read and written for a reason lets a child know that they are not alone. (2/7/04)
25. Letting a child learn from themselves, through the philosophical teachings that poems contain, is a great way to open young minds to the truths about real life. (2/7/04)
26. Twain does an awesome job of allowing us to enter into the mind of a child and experience the adventures that they meet each day. (2/7/04)
27. The child realizes that they are no longer the person they once were. They can no longer go back to being ignorant of the world and must now deal with the newfound maturity. (2/7/04)
28.. . .and the reader may often find themselves “proud” in a sense for her. . . (2/7/04)
29. When one thinks of moments in their lives that made a difference, they probably think of happy memories: (2/7/04)
30. Each character in this book has his own trials and tribulations that they must face. (2/7/04)
31. Overall, one cannot live their life without the ability to read and write. (2/7/04)
32. The reader knows they are safe from harm, but their imagination helps them to escape that reality and enter into the exciting realm of fear. (9/24/2004)
33.. . .the child must have a difficult concept, like death, explained to them in a way that they can understand. (9/24/2004)
34.. . .the tales need to be read to the right person, so the child understands the moral of the story, which they can apply to their life. (9/24/2004)
35. Many do not even flinch when he or she sees someone get murdered on television or in a movie. (9/24/2004)
36. In an egocentric nine year-old’s world, there is no greater hell than a sink full of dirty dishes. Immediately they empathize with [Cinderella’s] situation . . . (9/24/2004)
37. Every child likes to think of themselves as super heroes or super heroines. (9/24/2004)
38. “Snow White” could really startle a child and emphasize that they should be scared or worried about their parent hating them or neglecting them. (9/24/2004)
39. Once a child has learned their alphabet and has an understanding of simple stories, they can appreciate rhymes that are increasingly more complicated. (9/24/2004)
40. Ultimately, the best judge of rhymes can be the child themselves and this will be dependent on how long they enjoy the rhymes. (9/24/2004)
41. Although each tale has its own portrayal of love, the depiction is accurate as long as they are used in moderation and not applied to all situations. (9/24/2004)
42. From the moment that every child enters this world, they are surrounded by nonsense. (9/24/2004)
43. Not only is this difficult to read about but also gives the idea that a woman should do anything to be with the man they love. (9/24/2004)
44. If the reader does have sisters then the book is even more close to home for them because they feel like they are reading about themselves. (11/22/04)
45. An adolescent has to put themselves in the eight-year-olds shoes in order to fully understand the lesson that this poem teaches. (11/22/04)
46. When the reader rides in the covered wagon with Laura and her family they can see how lucky they are in their own lives. (11/22/04)
47. My favorite thing about this author is his attention to detail because he allows the reader to use their imagination but clearly gives the image. (2/5/05)
48. When an adolescent watches television, they tend to watch movies that have a violent plot. (2/14/05)
49. Every child probably fantasizes about going into a world in which they are queen or king, and no one can tell them what to do. (2/14/05)
50.This reader can see all of the hardships these girls go through but they stick with each other and make the best out of everything. (2/14/05)
51. Because of the violence in these fairy tales, children have an escape to their problems while watching someone else, through their imagination, conquer their problems. (2/14/05)
52. Once a child goes through a divorce, it is not very likely that a stepmother will come in and take the place of their real mother. (2/14/05)
53. It allows a child to take out aggression and angst towards adults in a healthy and empowering way without subjecting themselves to self defeating behaviors. (2/14/05)
54. A child reading The Jungle Books can place themselves in the jungle with Mowgli or they can be Mowgli and by both ways can escape the reality of their own life and experience life through the eyes of a four legged creature or a monkey swinging in the trees. (4/21/05)
55. By having animals in the stories, the author is allowing the child to use their imagination and create the world that they are reading about. (4/21/05)
56. There are many aspects of life that may lead a child to imagine himself or herself as an animal or express his or her feelings through stories of animals. (4/21/05)
57. For example, when a young adult is stressed about his or her life, he or she might wonder what it would be like if they were a fish in an aquarium, because they would not have to worry about anything and they could swim all day. (4/21/05)
58. A better reader is a better learner; and fairy tales help to challenge a child’s mind, cultivate their imaginative reading and also assist in teaching metaphors for later life. (5/3/05)
59. Since the tailor is just a little man, much like the audience, and he is overcoming all of his challenges, the reader takes this as a possibility for them to overcome whatever it is that they may be afraid of. It is very reassuring for them that an average man, if not below average, can surmount all he sets out to conquer. (5/3/05)
60. And I know that each author has their own style of writing. (9/17/05)
