Language Log She's they until you acknowledge her

She's they until you acknowledge her
I located this really lovely and delicate instance illustrating using
singular-antecedent they within a passage (right here)
created (or more likely dictated — this sounds like speech) by the
distinguished BBC Africa correspondent Ofeibea Quist-Arcton (photograph here) for the BBC, which asked a
number of foreign correspondents to write something about awful travel
experiences in Africa (I take the liberty of adding underlining on the
anaphoric pronouns I want to talk about):

One of my favourites is when you are sitting on the aircraft and you just
happen to have a free seat next to you - and you think, "my goodness, I
can lie down and sleep after one of those heavy assignments".

And then as you begin to relax, you see one of those huge West African
traders, she could be from Ghana, Nigeria or Senegal or Togo, you
name it.

Then you hear the footsteps coming down the plane boom,Buy Windows 7 Enterprise, boom, boom and
then you hear move over! Their 25 kg luggage is hurled onto your
lap, their boom box is pressed against your shoulder.

You all but carry their clothes on your head, whilst of course
this extremely,Office Professional Plus 2007, really determined woman, who is going to sit appropriate there, tries
to shove her stuff into the overhead compartment - but there is no
room left.

So you end up carrying her stuff on your lap - and that's how
your two-hour trip is going to end.

The first she has the antecedent one of those huge West
African traders. At that point the trader in the remembered anecdote
is a woman visible down at the front of the plane, waiting to get down the
aisle to find her seat. The appropriate pronoun for a woman you can see
is she. But our narrator still thinks she will be lucky and
spend the flight beside an empty seat. Perhaps she closes her eyes to
rest as the rest of the passengers board.

Then footsteps are heard ("boom, boom, boom"),Windows 7 Starter, and a voice ("move
over!") is heard,Office Standard 2007 Product Key,Win7 01 free wallpaper download no73268, and at this point (imagine you still have your eyes
closed) the producer of the pounding footsteps and stentorian voice is an
indefinite individual suitable to be referred to with singular
they. The genitive form of this pronoun (their) is
used three times (you can almost see Ms Quist-Arcton struggling to keep
her eyes closed, to pretend that she's asleep and this isn't
happening).

But the moment the phrase this quite, extremely determined woman has
been used, we are back inside a situation where the grammatical demands of
English call for the feminine pronoun: although I am always prepared to be surprised,Office 2010 Professional X86, my assumption is that you simply cannot say anything like
*The woman said they were unhappy with they referring to the
woman. (Compare if your partner says they are unhappy, which
plenty of people would use to allow for partners of either ######.) So the
final two pronoun references to the monstrous trader woman are forms of
the feminine singular she (the genitive form,
her).

This back-and-forth alternation between forms of she and
forms of they and back again is unusual, and I'm not
recommending it as the perfect style for carefully prepared serious
prose. But it offers a lovely glimpse the dynamics of pronoun choice.
The use of singular-antecedent they is incredibly subtle, and
I'm not going to offer a hard generalization. But we see here that it is
used when it is possible to imagine being mistaken about the ###### of the
referent or when the ###### of the referent is indeterminate, for example,
when neither details of the actual referent nor details of the noun that
occurs as the linguistic antecedent make feminine or masculine pronoun
gender a necessity.

So when a woman appears at the front of the plane and
you can see she is a woman, you have to refer to her with she
for pragmatic reasons. When you hear an unknown person approaching, they
can be referred to making use of they, even if they get close enough
to press their boom box against your shoulder. But the moment you
acknowledge that you are going to be seated next to this person,
and she is a woman, and you're going to help her
by carrying fifty pounds of her cabin baggage on your lap, and you acknowledge the situation linguistically by referring to her with the word woman, the pronoun she
has to be used from then on for grammatical reasons.

There is a subtle and stunning system right here. It is not to be dismissed
with the idiotic ######ist authoritarianism of Strunk and White's The
Elements of Style (p. 60: "Do not use they... Use the
singular pronoun... he), which so many Americans believe is
gospel.

Quist-Arcton, by the way, has an extraordinarily clear, refined,
impeccable, BBC British accent. As Mary Macfarlane of the University
of York reminds me, it is often the case that British
speakers are more comfortable with the English language as it is,
and hence less prone to
believe ill-informed prescriptive nonsense about what's "bad" or
"wrong" in use. Scores of literary citations can be given to show
that singular-antecedent they is common in good
writing as well as speech; but most of the literary sources are British;
it is American writers who are far more inclined to live in terror of the
usage fascists.
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at December 14, 2004 12:54 PM