"themself"?
November 7th, 2008 1 Comment
I just wrote the following as part of a training course I'm working on:
Select either Read or Had read to indicate whether the person read the document themself or had the document read to them.
Word complained (with its squiggly red underlining) about "themself", so I Googled it and came upon a Language Log entry by Geoff Pullum on the use of "they" to refer to a single person, where that person could be either male or female:
It's my duty to report that The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language takes the position that he is never generic, i.e., sex-neutral. Chapter 5, by Rodney Huddleston and John Payne (see page 492), talks about "Purportedly sex-neutral he", and on page 494 they give evidence that it just isn't true that this pronoun may be used in a sex-neutral way: if it could, then there would be nothing at all wrong with saying
Either the husband or the wife has perjured himself.
But that's a grammatical catastrophe, or a silly joke. One couldn't possibly think that was normal usage. Likewise with
Was it your father or your mother who broke his leg on a ski trip?
That is not how we say things in English. (The commonest way to get around the gender problem here is to use singular they: Was it your father or your mother who broke their leg on a ski trip?; Either the husband or the wife has perjured themself. Shakespeare used it; Jane Austen used it; loads of fine authors use it. Get used to it. And if you have a usage book like Strunk and White that declares singular they to be an error, throw that book away.)
So, I've left it as it is. It's not an elegant sentence but it does its job and this is a functional piece of documentation so, in this situation, function rates more highly than form.
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November 25th, 2008 at 9:18 am (#)
Thanks for that comment, it was helpful. I just googled "themself" to see if that term (which does indeed come naturally) really existed in writing, and it obviously does. Definitely feels better than a singular "themselves"!