Singular ‘They’ Is Perfect English. What ABoUt ‘Themself’?
Tags: Language, Writing, Words, History, Gender

Singular ‘They’ Is Perfect English. What ABoUt ‘Themself’?

Why some of us go to great lengths to avoid using ‘themself’ — and why we should embrace it instead Sjudfy Dec 13, 2020·7 min read

(ElisaRiva / Pixabay)

Incase you missed it, the jury is no longer out on whether or not singular they is acceptable. Heeding the calls of both LGBTQ activists and those who simply abhor linguistic prescriptivism (a.k.a. grammar Nazism), a number of highly-regarded news agencies and presses have incorporated the pronoun into their style guides, and in 2019, Merriam-Webster made singular they its word of the year. Such decisions are primarily in the interest of inclusivity, but the word also facilitates smoother language use when referring to someone whose gender is unknown. The recognition of singular they means that we can rid ourselves of the cumbersome he or she, his or her and himself or herself, as well as those particularly exhausting cases where all three are strung together (“He or she should decide for himself or herself what best represents his or her views”).

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That said, singular they does come with its quirks. One potential source of confusion is the obligatory switch from singular to plural verb conjugation when we go from referring to a non-binary person by their proper name to using the pronoun, as in: “Jamie goes to the movies all the time. I’d say they go see a film once every week.” This is something that needs to be taken into account when making contrastive statements, otherwise you might end up with exchanges along the lines of, “Jamie is not a licensed physician.” “They is too!” Still, it’s not as though this was unheard of in English before the notion of gender-inclusive language came along. A count noun like team and crowd will tend to behave like a singular entity when it comes to verbs, but typically attracts third-person plural pronouns, as this line from a Rolling Stone article about Sleater-Kinney proves: “the band is on the verge of releasing their excellent new album”. Its would technically also work here, and in fact, writers like Percy Bysshe Shelley and E. B. White were in favour of adopting the inanimate pronoun as a general alternative to singular they, as in “each child had its fairy godmother in its soul”. The problem with it, obviously, is that it dehumanises, and though it might seem fairly innocuous when speaking hypothetically, it certainly doesn’t bode well when talking about specific gender non-conforming people.

It’s everyone for themself

Another roadbump: how do reflexive pronouns work with singular they? Is it “They bought an ice-cream for themselves” or “They bought an ice-cream for themself”? The fickle finger of spellcheck tells me the latter pronoun is grammatically incorrect, and while we do occasionally see it in writing, historically themself has been used to characterise the speaker as uneducated or using a non-standard dialect, as in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: “She look so stylish it like the trees all round the house draw themself up tall for a better look.” Such connotations are perhaps why many of us are adamantly against using it. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English proclaims that “Theirselves and themself for themselves are limited to Vulgar English or imitations of it.” Writers for a number of major publications (here’s USA Today, The Financial Times, and The Telegraph) append a disapproving “[sic]” to any quotation that features the rogue pronoun, and in 2013, the Canadian parliament moved to remove it from the nation’s criminal code to “reflect the fact that ‘themself’ is not a word.”

But once again, history begs to differ. Katie Wales explains that themself was in use long before themselves, which only overtook its predecessor as the normal variant in the middle of the sixteenth century. Our conceptualisation of reflexives as compounds, which is what allows for phrases like “your good self” and “my future self”, is a relatively recent development — the word self began life in Old English as an intensifier, not a reflexive, appearing in constructions like “Swa swa crist sylf cwæð …” (“As Christ himself said …”). Meanwhile, normal personal pronouns were used reflexively, such that sentences to the effect of “I got me a new hat” were perfectly grammatical. It was only later on in the Old English period that self forms began appearing in reflexive constructions, and not until Middle English that they started to “agree” with the pronouns that preceded them (ourself, too, is the ancestor of ourselves, not the other way around).

The protagonist of ‘A Christmas Carol’ famously visited his former and future selves (Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

Today self is understood as a byword for personhood, soul, even body, which may be why so many English-based creoles literally use body parts in their reflexive pronouns — himself translates in Saramaccan, spoken in Suriname, as “en sinkii” (“him skin”), and in Nigerian Pidgin English as “im bodi” (“him body”). This interpretation of self fuels debates in the social sciences and literary studies, where selfhood is equated with identity and autonomy. The self can contain multitudes: Ebenezer Scrooge visits his past, present, and future selves. Or are they all shades of the one self? Well, it depends on your philosophy. What’s clear is that the grammar of modern standard English assigns one self per person; myselves doesn’t compute, nor does ourself, unless, of course, you’re using the royal we. By that logic, a sentence like “A politician is allowed to vote for themselves” just doesn’t work. This is often reflected in spoken language, but far less frequently in print; linguist Nancy Stern examined a corpus of contemporary American English and discovered that 75% of occurrences of the word were found in speech. The reason for this is likely people’s deep-seated linguistic insecurities, as “prescriptive pressures”, Stern writes, “are generally more prevalent in writing”.

Put another way: writers fear that using themself makes them look dumb. But why should they? The word is included in The Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, and has been explicitly okayed in a number of reference grammar books, including The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, where it is stated that as singular they grows in popularity, themself is likely to flourish along with it. As Stern comments, non-standard forms like themself are used to achieve communicative goals and make our speech more precise. Though language pedants may continue to bristle at the sight of the word for another few years or so, the rest of us shouldn’t be ashamed to use it. Linguistic change is inevitable, and anyone who chooses to lead the resistance rather than the innovation is doomed to be endlessly frustrated — but hey, that’s totally up to themself.