Shakespeare, Chaucer, And A Werewolf On The Forum ...

[BillyMac]

2022-2023 IAABO Significant Manual Changes

Change wording s/he, his/her, or he/she to the word they or their.

I like the change. I wish that the NFHS would do the same in both the rulebook and the casebook.

And for those that think that this change is ungrammatical, or a "woke" change:

One common bugbear of the grammatical stickler is the singular they. The complaint is this: the use of they as a gender-neutral pronoun (as in, “Ask each of the students what they want for lunch.”) is ungrammatical because they is a plural pronoun. People have used singular 'they' to describe someone whose gender is unknown for a long time. They has been in consistent use as a singular pronoun since the late 1300s; that the development of singular they mirrors the development of the singular you from the plural you, yet we don’t complain that singular you is ungrammatical; and that regardless of what detractors say, nearly everyone uses the singular they in casual conversation and often in formal writing.

In the 17th century, English laws concerning inheritance sometimes referred to people who didn’t fit a gender binary using the pronoun it, which, while dehumanizing, was conceived of as being the most grammatically fit answer to gendered pronouns around then. Adopting the already-singular they is vastly preferable.

The singular they has been around for hundreds of years: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599), and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1386) to have already used the singular they to describe a person’s features. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, singular they can be traced back to 1375, in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf. That’s from more than 600 years ago.

English had finally welcomed the use of the singular they. At least, the Washington Post made it official. That was in 2015. And then in January 2016, the American Dialect Society named they as “used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun” as their 2015 Word of the Year.