I have often been asked by people over 35 or so, “Are we supposed to say ‘they want’ or ‘they wants’?” I always answer that the proper form is “they want,” but must it be? Instead, we could say this, which would make perfect and intuitive grammatical sense:
Singular: I want, you want, he/she/they wants
Plural: we want, you want, they want
My proposal is that we agree that male, man and boy refers to a person born with a penis, and that female, woman and girl refers to a person born with a vagina. For the exceedingly rare people born with neither or both, they can choose. My proposal has the advantage of being consistent across cultures for thousands of years.
The pronoun thing is getting weird. I occasionally read the teacher forum on Reddit. Using “he” or “she” is starting to look antiquated. Teachers avoid use “they” or “them”, even when the sex of the child is obvious or mentioned earlier in the post. Here is an example:
He was one of the laziest, rudest students I’ve had in 8 years of teaching. I feel like throwing a party now that he’s gone. Sometimes I feel a tiny bit bad that I’m celebrating losing a kid, but that feeling is very much overshadowed by joy and relief from not having to deal with them anymore. I’m sure all of you can relate.
I added the bold font. There are certainly more egregious examples, but this was the first post I clicked on. Are teachers getting lazier or dumber?
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