2019's Word of the Year is Inclusive, Not Divisive
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Have you heard that Merriam-Webster chose the word they as the "Word of the Year"? And that it was chosen as the "Word of the Decade" by the American Dialect Society? We are not surprised. You probably recall that we ran three articles in July-August 2019 discussing the singular they (How Did They Get in Here?, How Can They Be Singular?, and Singular They Part III.)
We covered a lot of ground in those articles, from displeasure with writers simply being careless about subject-verb agreement, to the fact that singular they has been used by famous writers for more than 600 years, especially with pronouns considered to be singular, such as each, everyone, and everybody. But it's still no excuse for carelessness, especially when a simple recasting of a sentence solves the problem. For example, "Each side in the condo fight has spent more than $350,000 on their campaigns …," a sentence we found in a major metropolitan newspaper. Simply replace their campaigns with its campaign.
We also talked about what was once considered an acceptable replacement for the gender-specific pronouns he or she in sentences such as "Every student has done his homework." Writing this sentence as "Every student has done his or her homework," while grammatically acceptable, suffers from being cumbersome. It also disregards the LGBTQ community and others who choose to be identified by gender-neutral pronouns such as they (subject case) or them (object case) over the gender-binary, masculine-feminine pronouns he/him, she/her.
We agree and support this use of singular they when a sentence cannot be rewritten in gender-neutral terms or when persons prefer they/them. We also wonder if a grammatical solution might be to embrace a new pronoun for this purpose. What do you think of shey—a word inclusive of he, she, and (sort of) they?
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Let's talk about one more thing today: What's the proper pronunciation of the word divisive? This one could become the Word of the Year for 2020 considering the nature of American politics today (sadly, maybe world politics as well). Have you noticed some pundits pronouncing the second syllable with a short i, as in division? Does that sound a bit, um, pretentious to you?
We checked some of our office dictionaries. Going back as far as 1941, each of them contains only one pronunciation—long i, as in divide. It's not until the 1999 edition of Webster's New World College Dictionary that we see the notation "also ĭ," which to us simply acknowledges that some people say it that way.
Charles Harrington Elster mentions in his The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations that he first noticed this nonstandard mispronunciation in George H. W. Bush's inaugural address in 1989. Within fifteen years it had begun to infect otherwise careful speakers. Elster suggests the short-i pronunciation may have "the my-pronunciation's-better-than-yours appeal" for some persons, but careful speakers will continue to pronounce the second syllable with a long i. As careful speakers, so will we.
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