I have just restrained myself from commenting at length on someone else's blog post about 'singular they' because I really don't want to be that person. Even if no-one ever reads it, I would rather use my own (long-neglected and now completely gutted) blog as the place for my thoughts. Language bloggers, Language Log in particular, have already said a lot about something often called 'singular they', and I'm not interested in repeating it, except as far as is necessary to establish why I feel moved comment on some of it. For now, I think it is enough to say that under some circumstances, they can be used to refer to a singular entity, like this example from the Walsall Advertiser (emphasis added).
To help counter this, the Redundancy Support Roadshow, has been developed using the real-life experience of a person who lost their job.My original motivation to write came from the post linked above, where Motivated Grammar says: "You don’t have to use singular they yourself. You can go ahead and re-work your sentences to avoid it. You can employ he or she, or s/he, or some stupid made-up gender-neutral pronoun of your own devising like xe" (emphasis added). This comes at the end of an otherwise useful summary, which on probably every other point I would not argue with, but I think this -- although it's not really any more than a dismissive aside -- doesn't address xe and the like in a useful way. My first comment was this:
I found this post via Language Hat, and I’m thrilled somebody has taken the time to summarise all this; LL and others cover the points, but it's it's [sic] great to have everything in one place.So for now, I will end here, hoping that my comment gives a flavour of where I might take this discussion in the future. Basically, my concern is that while many have one or the other, few people seem to be in possession of what I'd consider to be the best ideas about both (1) the linguistic facts, and (2) the gender facts involved.
But the aside in your summary about "stupid made-up" gender neutral terms like "xe", brief as it is, seems to miss the point by dismissing them out of hand. Their advocates don’t always make the case very well, but innovations like "xe" et al. address a problem, which is that singular they is not really usable for singular referents with a high degree of definiteness* (e.g. "I waited an hour for Kim but they never showed up."). So "xe" fills this gap, where the speaker wants to refer to a particular person but (1) doesn’t know / care about their gender, (2) the person is not male or female, or other situations you can imagine for yourself. This might seem odd to some, but it’s a very real communicative need for some speakers of English.
*As an aside to be considered later, I think that a proper explanation of the limits of singular they probably needs to consider the degree of specificity of the referent as well as its/their(!) degree of definiteness.
