Thread by @leahvelleman

A LINGUISTIC MYSTERY
about singular "they"
starring my parents
who are lovely humans and incredibly sappy

1/

So the last time I saw my parents, I noticed something odd.

When I talk about nonbinary friends using singular "they," they don't bat an eye. Total comprehension, no complaints.

When I talk about my nonbinary spouse using singular "they," they get CONFUSED. 2/

It's sincere confusion! They aren't objecting. They aren't faking confusion in order to make some asinine point about prescriptive grammar. They really do just get PERPLEXED about which people, and how many people, I'm referring to.

But they only do it for my spouse! 3/

It's not a difference in familiarity: they've met a lot of my nonbinary friends.

It's not a time difference: my spouse has used this pronoun as long as my friends.

It's not that they object to me marrying a nonbinary person: they think my spouse is rad.

So... why is it? 4/

HERE'S WHAT I THINK IS HAPPENING

Singular "they" is not a monolith. A lot of people can use it in some contexts, but not others. 5/

(Or to put it another way: not everyone has made the same amount of progress towards learning singular "they."

Some of us find it natural everywhere. Some -- even if they *want* to use it everywhere -- still only find it natural in specific uses.) 6/

For instance, as you might know, a lot of people can say "someone left their wallet on the train" but not "my friend Quill left their wallet on the train."

For those people, specificity matters: generic singular "they" feels fine, specific singular "they" feels weird. 7/

Well, here's another difference that sometimes matters. A lot of people can use singular "they" for a specific person SO LONG AS THAT PERSON IS NOT VERY IMPORTANT TO THEM.

I don't know if this has an official name. I sometimes call it "distal singular they." 8/

For people with distal singular "they," it's fine to say "this dude I worked with left their wallet on the train" -- with the implication that the dude in question is not very important to them -- but it feels weird to say "my best friend left their wallet on the train." 9/

So here's my theory.

My parents have distal singular "they."

When I use "they" to talk about a friend, they accept the distal stuff. "Leah is marking that friend as unimportant. I guess she must feel kinda distant from them."

BUT THEY CAN'T DO THAT FOR MY SPOUSE 10/

They are INCURABLE ROMANTICS. They are SAPS. They cannot POSSIBLY accommodate the idea that I am marking my spouse as unimportant-to-me.

Which means that in their grammar a singular reading is not possible. I must be talking about multiple people!

So they get confused. 11/

And because syntax and semantics happen unconsciously, the confusion is genuine.

They don't know they're making all these inferences. They just sometimes hit a case where their grammar and worldview collide, and only the plural interpretation is available, and WHAT EVEN. 12/

And this is what's cool about pronouns, especially at this moment in history.

They're grammar, but not JUST grammar.
They're meaning, but not JUST meaning.
They're social assumptions, but they're not JUST that.

You need all of those things together to explain what happened. 13/

Epilogue: Also, because my parents are awesome, I talked to them about it and they're trying to do better on the "they" thing. Because the other great thing about grammar is it's learnable!

HERE ENDETH THE LESSON

14/