Everybody Has Their Opinion

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Other recommended sentences:
* Each president chooses their own cabinet.
* Nobody fancies for a moment that they are reading about any thing beyond the pale [meaning: boundary] of ordinary propriety


Johnson l Everybody Has Their Opinion; English lacks an uncontroversial gender-neutral pronoun but it does have a traditional solution. Economist, Apr 1, 2017.
http://www.economist.com/news/bo ... er-neutral-pronouns

Quote:

"at a recent meeting of the American Copy Editors Society, the 'Chicago Manual of Style' and the Associated Press (AP) stylebook, both widely followed, announced a change that sent waves through the audience. In AP's wording, 'They/them/their is acceptable in limited cases as a singular and-or gender-neutral pronoun, when alternative wording is overly awkward or clumsy.'

"The AP and Chicago (and the forthcoming edition of The Economist stylebook) open the door to a controversial—but surprisingly traditional—solution to the problem: 'each president chooses their own cabinet.' Some people say it is illogical: each president is singular, and their is clearly plural.

"But that is wrong. Their can do double-duty just as your can for both singular and plural. You has a partly parallel history. First, it was the object form of ye for a plural: we-us, ye-you. Then it replaced ye: we-us, you-you. It was then used as a polite way to refer to a single person, much like the French vous. Then it started edging out the common way to refer to a single person, thou. From second-person-plural pronoun in the objective case to a singular in the nominative is a pretty big shift. Pressing they/their/them into service for a generic or unknown referent is actually less of a leap. * * * the singular they is hardly a newfangled political invention. The Oxford English Dictionary's first citation for a sex-neutral, indefinite they is from about 1375. (Singular you as a subject dates back only to 1405.) Singular they appears subsequently in an unbroken stream of high-quality sources from the King James Bible ('in lowlinesse of minde let each esteeme other better then themselues') to the writings of Walter Bagehot, a former editor of The Economist ('Nobody fancies for a moment that they are reading about any thing beyond the pale of ordinary propriety') to today."

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Note:
(a) Johnson is the name of the column about English language.
(i) "The name was taken from Samuel Johnson, the English language's first great dictionary writer."  A blog of Economist.com (take notice the emphasis is on "great," not on "first" -- many before him had compiled an English dictionary.
(ii) Samuel Johnson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson
(1709-1784; "Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755. * * * Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later [Published volume by volume, in the order of (A and B' in 1888) through (T to Z; in 1928)], Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent British dictionary")

(b)
(i) The summary of this column is: The Economist recommends we say "Everybody has their opinion."  Of course, recommendation is one thing, acceptance is another.

The convention is: Everybody has his opinion. But this is no longer politically correct. Some say: Everybody has his or her opinion. But it is troublesome if the speaker has to repeat this many times.
(ii) Before I did, once in a blue moon, encounter "Everybody has their opinion" -- but thought the grammar was incorrect.

(c) Chicago Manual of Style
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicago_Manual_of_Style
(published since 1906 by the University of Chicago Press)
(d) "English lacks an uncontroversial pronoun that lets you talk about a person of a generic or unknown gender—known as an 'epicene' pronoun, from the Greek for 'common to all' (genders)."

epicene (adj; ultimately from Ancient Greek epikoinos: epi upon, above + koinos common):
"having characteristics of both sexes or no characteristics of either sex; of indeterminate sex  <the sort of epicene beauty peculiar to boys of a certain age>"
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/epicene

* Wiktionary has a note for this word: "Used as a synonym for hermaphrodite and androgynous from the 17th century."  Just like the example in OED, "epicene" is not solely used in grammar.

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(i) Old English grammar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar
(section 1.5 Pronouns: "Most pronouns are declined by number, case and gender")
(A) decline (v): "[intransitive, transitive] decline (something) (grammar) if a noun, an adjective or a pronoun declines, it has different forms according to whether it is the subject or the object of a verb, whether it is in the singular or plural, etc. When you decline a noun, etc., you list these forms."
Oxford Learner's Dictionary, undated.
www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/topic/grammar/decline_2
(B) To put it simply, the "nominative case," "genitive case," "accusative case," and "dative case" are, respectively, sunject, possessive, direct object and indirect object.  The enw.wikipedia.org for the page of "dative case" gives an example: "Maria gave Jacob a drink," where Jacob and a drink are , respectively, direct and indirect objects.
(C) Do not worry that the words in this section look weird. These words were written in letters of that era, not Modern English with 26 letters. What the Old English words look like in the Modern English alphabet will be displayed in (iii).
(ii) Middle English
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English
(section 3.2 Pronouns)

So you see, in Middle English, the first-person plural form for subject and object were indeed "we/us" (as this Economist article says).
(iii)
(A) Seamus Cooney, A Note on Shakespeare's Grammar. Western Michigan University, Sept 15, 1996.
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/tchg/lit/adv/shak.gram.html

The table in section (1)(A) Pronouns is not entirely correct, where "thine" is the sole possessive formfor second person singular. See next.
(B) centrelli, Thou, Thee, Thy, Thine & Ye: Shakespearean English. (Un) Enlightened English, July 1, 2009.
http://unenlightenedenglish.com/ ... kespearean-english/

Quote:

"Word                Translation        When to use
* * *
Thy                Your                        Possessive form of you. Commonly used before a noun that begins with a consonant/consonant sound (like the article, "a").
Thine        Your                        Possessive form of you. Commonly used before a noun that begins with vowel/vowel sound (like the article, "an"). Also used when indicating that something is "absolute and understood."

(iv) King James Bible (completed in 1611; Compare William Shakespeare (1564-1616) ): "in lowlinesse of minde let each esteeme other better then themselues"  Philippians 2:3

Several versions of Modern English Bible translate as follows: "in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves"


(f) "The alternatives are worse. * * * Inventing pronouns does not help: from hersh ['he or she' as well as its pronunciation, compressed to one word] to ze, made-up gender-neutral pronouns have never taken off and probably never will.  One alternative would be to make the referent plural: 'Presidents choose their own cabinets.' "

referent (n): "one that refers or is referred to"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/referent