10/25/25
After presenting the thirteen rules of grammar for the HTML forum, Harry Binswanger finishes with:
Ayn Rand once urged her writers to "wage a holy war for grammar." The reason is that grammar is the means to precision and clarity. Wrong or even non-standard usage produces at minimum a little crow-space-draining, and, when it's more serious, problems ranging from unclarity to unintelligibility.
How about the singular "they" pronoun? By this I mean sentences like these, given by the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
The Wikipedia article on "singular they" writes that some "early-21st-century style guides described it as colloquial and less appropriate in formal writing," but "by 2020, most style guides accepted the singular they as a personal pronoun."
This term has been accepted as a result of DEI and Critical Race theory that has taken the country by storm. I am surprised to see that public Objectivists have not criticized it, but are using it themselves! For example, it is extensively used in the New Ideal videos.
The only place I heard this challenged is in one Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. He asked a man to whom others in the room referred to as "they": "Are you plural?"
I am curious what had to go in a mind of a person who had accepted the singular "they" pronoun, and now he automatically speaks like that.
10/26/25
Is there any notable work of English literature (or any language) written prior or during the life of Ayn Rand, where singular "they" is frequently and consistently used, except to fix an awkward sentence? I can see that indefinite pronoun like "anyone" feels kind of plural, but that's not the singular "they" issue I'm raising.
I heard that George Eliot is considered to be one of the greatest novelists of the English Language. I asked ChatGPT if she used the singular "they" pronoun, and it answered:
Yes — George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) did occasionally use singular "they" in her writing, though not frequently.
Eliot wrote during the Victorian era, when singular they was already well-established in English for centuries (used by writers like Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens). While Eliot's prose is often more formal, you can find examples where she uses they/their to refer to an indefinite or unknown person — exactly the same way we use singular they today (e.g., "If anyone thinks they can…").
So, while she didn't use it as a modern gender-neutral pronoun in a social or identity sense, she did use singular they in the traditional grammatical sense — referring to a person whose gender was unknown or unspecified. [Emphasis mine.]
The singular "they" I am criticizing is the case when a writer is afraid to look insensitive to the other sex. I have seen many textbooks where the author attempts to avoid the issue by always referring to a student as a "she."
Leonard Peikoff addressed the issue in his podcast, and rejected this need. He argued that using "he" is correct. (The search on the peikoff.com website is broken and I cannot find the recording.)
In Russian language, when sex is unknown, we always use "he." Also, please note that in Russian, just like in French, every word has a gender (only a biological being can have a sex). For example, the word "dog" is female, and if I make it a subject of a sentence, then the whole sentence must be written in female gender, even if the dog is male.
This brings me to another issue — gender and sex. It used to be that forms were not afraid to ask "what's your sex?," but now they ask, "what's your gender?" This is DEI; there's no good reason to do that. Gender should be limited to grammar only, to the way sentences are formed.
10/28/25
Gregory Gordon and Garrett Garcia remind us about the fact that there used to be a singular pronoun "thou," which "you" replaced. I accept the singular "you," but I reject the singular "they" in favour of generic "he."
A friend of mine worked for Evgeny Chichvarkin's company Euroset in Russia. My friend told me that Chichvarkin instituted the policy that all employees must use the American form of address in order to simplify communication.
(At age 35, Chichvarkin was the richest man in Russia, having net worth of $1.6 billion. He left Russia after refusing to bow to Putin. He styles himself as a libertarian, and frequently recommends Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.)
Normally, when you don't know a person well, or if he has higher status, or in a formal setting, then you must address him in plural form (like "vous" in French). In addition, you may not address a person by either first name or last name, you must address him by the combination of his first name and his middle name. One must keep a social account of every person, and to remember on what familiarity base one is with him.
However, in languages like Hebrew and English, communication is much simpler, because the same pronoun is used in all cases to directly address a person. This helps productivity because it takes the communication from the realm of etiquette and posturing to the realm of discussing the substantive ideas.
I have a theory why "thou" got lost, and "you" replaced it: the former sounds more sophisticated and fancier than the latter. As I argue above, simplification of communication is preferred, so the pronoun "you" stayed and the fancier form didn't.
To avoid making this post too long, I will close that although many languages have simplified the second person pronoun (by removing the plural form of address), no language has a third person singular pronoun that is widely used. The singular "they" pronoun in English, albeit used for hundreds of years, was used rarely, not as commonplace.
Since Covid, however, the singular "they" pronoun appears in every sentence involving third person references, so much so, that many dictionaries felt compelled to update their positions on it. (Probably for fear of being cancelled.)
11/15/25
Several counter-arguments were presented in favour of the singular "they," arguing that sometimes it feels natural to native speakers. I am not a native speaker of English, but I am not sure that being native speaker alone is sufficient to nullify my argument. We become native speakers by absorbing, since birth, the language from the way people speak around us. The same process happens to those learning the language as a second language, but the absorption is more effective to native speakers. But if others are using the pronoun incorrectly, that is what you'll learn: the incorrect usage. I claim that using "they" for a singular person is incorrect logically and conceptually.
To answer the specific example brought earlier, it does not sound good to me to ask about a single person "in which hotel are they staying?" It sounds much better to me to ask "in which hotel is he staying?" Given additional context, I might switch the pronoun to "she."
Second, the "they" pronoun became the "safe" pronoun. A chess analysis tool referred to my opponent as "they" while analyzing a game. One might justify this because the software doesn't know the sex of the player. (However, software usually asks users' sex on sign-up.) But "they" is now the preferred safe choice even when the sex of the person is known! For instance, I observed this curious situation: a little girl asks her mother where she went, and the mother replies that "someone left something, and I went to give it to them."
(What of the fact that Shakespeare used it? He and others used it so rarely, that it is proof that this use is experimentation, and is not normal.)
The case of the "they" pronoun is a loud illustration of the power of ideas ruling history. The idea in question is that a person can choose his pretend sex and everybody must abide by his wish and play the charade. The idea has spread so totally, pervasively, that even the Objectivists didn't notice how it influenced them.
I am observing that many Objectivists are unable to resist the siren call of the collective. The "they" pronoun is one example, support for Trump is another. There are other examples, but that's for another post.