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Grammatical gender is the concept, found in
about a quarter of the world's languages,

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that you can sort all nouns into male or female.
La or le in French. Der, die, or das in German

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-- the das is for neuter. In Zande, which
is found across a few countries in Central

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Africa, there are four grammatical genders:
human male, human female, animate, and inanimate.

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There are occasional languages with even more
complicated systems.

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Now, I'm a descriptivist linguist. I am not
meant to judge whether language features are

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good or bad, I'm just meant to describe what
they do. But grammatical gender is just such

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a stupid concept. I sort-of hate myself for
saying that, but it's really silly. Oh, that's

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a computer, is it, French? So it's male. All
computers are male. And that's a bottle, is

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it French? So it's female? All bottles are
female? Really? Should I dress it up in a

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friggin' pink apron and give it a rolling
pin as well?

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(Descriptivism, Tom. Don't judge.)

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I'm exaggerating, but I genuinely have tried
searching the literature for any advantages

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of grammatical gender. There's only one vaguely
convincing argument, which is that it can

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help clear up ambiguities and speeds up recognition
of words by a small amount. Okay. But three-quarters

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of the world's languages manage just fine
without it. And meanwhile, grammatical gender

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causes a heck of a lot of problems.

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First problem: it affects the way you think.
When asked to describe a key, German speakers

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-- who classify key as male -- were likely
to associate it with "hard," "heavy," and

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"jagged," whereas Spanish speakers -- who
classify key as female -- were more likely

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to say it was "golden," "intricate," and "little".
That also says a lot about gender roles in

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society, but my word, that's something I ain't
qualified to talk about.

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Second problem: it's really clunky. Job adverts
in languages with grammatical gender have

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to either use both terms or a half-assed marker
to clarify that they're asking for anyone.

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Which brings me to English. English doesn't
have grammatical gender -- it used to, in

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Old English. We've still got a couple of words
like blond and blonde that change depending

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on gender, but we don't have to worry about
having to file everything into one box or

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another.

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But what we do have is the third-person pronouns
"he", "she", and "it". And that's a problem.

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If I want to refer to you, the viewer, I have
to use the pronoun "he or she". Which is ludicrous

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for several reasons: one, it's an unwieldy
three syllables, and it sounds awful. Two,

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there are folks who don't fit into, or don't
want to declare as, either of those categories,

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and if that surprises you, you need to get
out more. Since "it" is a bit dehumanising,

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there's really no suitable pronoun to use.

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Except. English does have a solution. And
lots of people are using it. And a lot of

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old stick-in-the-mud folks hate it. The answer
is "they".

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Facebook is using "they". I signed up to Facebook
before they started asking for gender, and

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I've never actually told them that I'm a guy.
So my friends will see "Tom Scott updated

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their profile picture". And you know what?
That sounds absolutely fine to me. It just

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seems normal now. It's going to depend on
your dialect whether it sounds good to you,

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but brace yourself, 'cos singular they? It's
spreading fast. I bet you didn't even notice

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when I used it in the very first sentence
of this video. And it's got history. Even

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Shakespeare used it.

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Better yet, because "they" sounds natural,
it gets around the problem of trying to force

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invented pronouns into English -- which, let's
be honest, has never really worked.

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So there you go. I've gone against my descriptivist
training, and said that one linguistic trait

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is better than another.

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And I'm okay with that. Because... some people
are "they". Get over it.

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