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by g4k 3860 days ago
This may be right, but it does not sound right.
3 comments

It's not right. There are linguistic restrictions on gender-neutral, singular 'they'.[1] When the referent is known, it can't be used (i.e. it's not about 'patrick' and 'he' matching up, it's about 'they' not being usable with a known person).[2]

My favourite real-life example of it's usage is one in which we know that the gender is female, and we know it's singular:

"If a mother wants to use the nursing room, they can just key in the code in their pamphlet".

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3cgbyv/limitat... gives some good discussion

[2] I can't help but feel that these restrictions are related to nondefinite contexts for "(negative polarity items)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarity_item]", like 'no-one' and 'any', where you can't say e.g.

    *I ate any cake
but you can say:

    I didn't eat any cake
but you can also use it in questions:

    Did you eat any cake?
This seems related to usages like

    If someone comes, tell them to wait
vs

    *If John comes, tell them to wait.
It doesn't sound right because the username includes "patrick", which implies a "he". Singular "they" doesn't replace "he" or "she" when gender is known.

It sounds a bit more natural if you say "That user didn't read the article, so they were uninformed."

> Singular "they" doesn't replace "he" or "she" when gender is known.

It does when the gender identity of the subject is known to be neither he nor she!

Why not? This is not new at all, I've used it whenever I'm not sure of the gender of a subject for as long as I can remember.