Themself
In my recent
posting
on generic pronouns, I looked at the following sentence from Elsa
Dixler:
(1) Every artist "becomes" herself as
she matures...
(with forms of feminine singular
she
used for generic reference) and contemplated various alternatives,
including one with "singular
they":
(2) Every artist "becomes" themselves
as they mature...
which I found grotesque. My mailbox is now filling up with
suggestions that I should have gone for "singular
themself":
(3) Every artist "becomes" themself as
they mature...
I omitted this possibility in the hope that I could achieve a brief and
quick posting, without going into an assortment of side issues.
But, once again, that is not to be.
The very short response to my correspondents is that singular
themself is not standard. As
MWDEU (1989) puts it (p. 898):
This use of themself is similar to the use of they, their, and them in reference to singular
terms... Such use of they,
their, and them is old and well established,
but this use is not.
Wilson's
Columbia Guide
(1993) is stern on the matter (p. 435):
Theirselves
and themself for themselves are limited to Vulgar
English or imitations of it; both are shibboleths.
adding that
Themself
can also occur as an unfortunate result of trying to avoid using a
gender-explicit reflexive pronoun by using a blend of the plural them with the singular self. The choices are themselves or himself or herself or both the last two...
(Wilson is perfectly happy with singular
they. In fact, he recommends
it, in all but the most formal writing.)
Burchfield's
Fowler's (1996,
rev. 1998) is more moderate. Noting that
themself had an earlier history,
but largely disappeared from sight after the 16th century, Burchfield
reports (p. 777):
A remarkable by-product of the search
for gender-neutral pronouns, themself
re-emerged in the 1980s. It is a minority form, but one that
turns up from time to time... This new pronominal form can hardly
be viewed as standard--yet.
(On p. 779, Burchfield accepts singular
they, though with a hint of
reluctance.)
Here on Language Log, references to singular
themself have been few, mostly in
passing, though there is one use of it by Geoff Pullum in a
defense
of generic
they (it's in
Geoff's second example):
The commonest way to get around the
gender problem here is to use singular they:
Was it your father or your mother who
broke their leg on a ski trip?;
Either the husband or the wife has perjured themself.
Shakespeare used it; Jane Austen used it; loads of fine authors use it.
Get used to it. And if you have a usage book like Strunk and White that
declares singular they to be
an error, throw that book away.
Shakespeare and Austen certainly used singular
they, but so far as I know neither
of them used singular
themself.
The linguistic literature on singular
themself
is pretty sparse. The most extensive study I know of is a
Stanford honors thesis by Joel Wallenberg, written under my direction
in 2003 and unfortunately not generally available. He used both
corpus searches and informant judgments, collected by e-mail, to map
out the variation in singular
themself
(
themself-I, I for
"individual", as in (3) above);
themselves
with singular reference (
themselves-I,
as in (2) above); and two non-standard reflexives you might not have
suspected were out there,
themself
and
ourself with
PLURAL
reference (
themself-N and
ourself-N, N for "numerous"), as in
The kids hurt themself and
We hurt ourself. (In this
notation, the standard reflexives are
themselves-N
and
ourselves-N.)
His 33 informants sorted themselves into groups on several
dimensions. People in the two largest groups accepted both
themselves-I and
themself-I. The next largest
group accepted
themself-I but
NOT the prescribed standard
themselves-I. In fact, only 4
of the 33 did not accept
themself-I,
suggesting that Burchfield is probably right in thinking that
themself-I is the wave of the
future.
Back to the
New York Times.
Would it countenance
themself-I?
Well, yes, but not often, and mostly in material quoted from speech,
plus occasionally in "light" contexts (sports, feature stories, and the
like). A search through the archives pulled up only 38
occurrences since 1981, which is less than two per year. Some of
these are duplicates, one is from a Safire column deprecating the
usage, and most of the rest are in material quoted from speech. I
suspect that if Dixler had used (3) above, it would have been altered
to (2).
[More mail, now suggesting the variant
theirself. This is a double loser: possessive instead of accusative first element, and singular instead of plural second element. Raw Google web statistics bear this out:
themselves (both parts standard) 138,000,000
themself (first part standard) 1,230,000
theirselves (second part standard) 211,000
theirself (neither part standard) 74,800]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 8, 2007 05:03 PM