The problem, of course, is that we can't because none of us gets to decide.
Not sure what that's supposed to mean.
That none of us gets to decide how to change the language.
Well, yeah, that much is obvious. And you could legitimately post a variant of that observation in almost every thread apart from "Did you take your meds today?"
I don't know, ofc, but would hazzard a guess that Jack's curious as to why it's a problem for you wrt this particular issue, and not, say, wrt to what we think should be done about Donald Trump?
But to witter on a bit more, I might add that it's pretty cool that language remains (more-or-less) a genuinely democratic phenomenon, with correctness determined by common usage. I mean , once most of us individually adopt a particular parlance , that becomes de facto , correct , and will soon be recognised as correct by academia. And if that makes it hard for any given individual to impose their will on it, that's also cool, ofc.
I also think it's pretty cool that we do have some arbiters of good taste and clarity (eg grammaticists, editors) who have rather more influence than the average bod-in-the-streetwhen it comes to establishing conventions. That's cool because they are people who know and care about language, as it happens. and can help to prevent communication snarl-ups when things change in some stupid and ambiguous direction (eg the spelling of "lose" the sameway as "loose". Maybe they can't stop that; maybe that's the future "'correct' spelling, and then we'll have to check the context carefully whenever we write one of those words, wont we? but they can slow that change down, at the very least. eg. they can ensure you get marked down if you write "looser"in an essay without explaining "looser than what?" or why looseness is a factor )
What isn't cool, IMO , is that political pressure groups are now having an excessive influence, too. So we're getting things like the centuries-old natural drift towards they/their/them as singulars rushed through unnaturally fast, without anybody coming up with alternative plurals. (We do need to discriminate between singular and plural at times. that is, if we want to be understood- which is the whole point of language in the first place isn't it?) If things were left to proceed at their natural pace, such problems would be naturally ironed out. Whilst i don't like to upset transexuals, I don't find "let's all talk a load of acane bollox at each other to avoid upsetting transexuals" to be a good trade off.
Nor do i like that 'people can be maligned as "bigots" when they chose the wrong pronoun. That's upsetting for people too. And that word is indubitably
meant to be offensive and judgmental isn't it? which fact supercharges the sting. Do the feelings of non-transexuals no longer matter?
Invented words- even invented pronouns-
do take root when they answer a commonly-felt need . "She" certainly took root, didn't it? And we're going to
have to be inventive here if we want to have
both singular and plural gender-neatral pronouns, and to be able to tell them apart. And inasmuch as we want clear communication, I'm pretty sure that we
do want both, even if some of us haven't yet noticed that. The drift towards adopting they/thior/them as singulars got stuck partway because, so long as we also (and even pimarily) regard them as plurals , they are highly ambigous in any number of contexts. So, we evidently need to either invent some singulars (or commissuon some redundant or vulgar singulars) or else nab the plurals, and invent some new plurals.
How to get people to agree on any one particular solution is a bloody great big problem. Yeah. Maybe lobbying for one particular solution and calling people bigots when they fail to fall in line is the only fast way forward. I don't like it , though. And I like it even less that the proposed solution only adresses
half the problem and leaves us no better off, linguistically.
Oops! ranting again