Singular "they"

[Apologies if I have posted on this topic before.]

I am normally a great fan of the Chicago Manual of Style, especially their regular Q&A series. However, I have to take issue with the following.

Q. In reading a marketing piece written by a co-worker, I thought that the following sentence contained a possessive pronoun that disagrees in number with its antecedent: “We tailor each client’s portfolio to meet their investment objectives.” Personally, I think “their” should be “his,” “his/her,” or “its” because “each client” is singular. Another approach, in my opinion, would be to make the entire sentence plural, i.e., “We tailor our clients’ portfolios to meet their investment objectives.” However, that construction loses some of the connotation that each portfolio is individually constructed for each client. Please help!

A. Although your colleagues are using bad grammar, that construction is very popular and tough to fight. The use of “their” replaced the use of “his” as the latter pronoun came to be considered sexist. “His or her” can get annoying if used frequently. It’s a problem that no one has figured out how to solve elegantly. Writers of lengthy books or articles can use “his” in some passages and “her” in others. That’s not an option if you are writing a short document or a slogan, but rephrasing (often by changing the subject to a plural) is almost always possible. Since you don’t want a plural subject, you could say, “We tailor each portfolio to meet the client’s investment objectives.”

It is true that the use of "their" as a substitute for "his" has become more popular in recent years, but in fact it has always been around, along with the use of "they" to mean "he or she". Henry Churchyard has written an informative page on the use of the singular "they" by Jane Austen, including the following quotations:

"Who is in love with her? Who makes you their confidant?"
"but it is not every body who will bestow praise where they may."
"[Mr. Woodhouse] was happily placed, quite at his ease, ready to talk with pleasure of what had been achieved, and advise every body to come and sit down, and not to heat themselves."
"there is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry."

I remind the gentle reader that this is Jane Austen, a woman who is practically worshipped in English departments around the world, and whose very punctuation sends thrills of delight up the spines of professors. Edward Said fell from grace in Britain not because of his scathing criticisms of orientalism and British imperialism, but because he had the gall to make some disparaging remarks about her. As one writer at the time said, "Touch Jane Austen and you're toast."

So if it's good enough for Jane Austen (along with Shakespeare, Fielding, Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, Byron, Thackeray, Ruskin and Lewis Carroll) why isn't it good enough for the CMS? An obvious rejoinder would be that Austen's work also contains many examples of usage that was normal around 1800 but odd now (spelling "everybody" as "every body", for example). After all, if historical precedent were enough, it would still be alright to put "-eth" on  the end of verbs. However, the initial complaint was that it was a well-intentioned but ungrammatical neologism, pointing to a situation with some people (including the majestic Austen) using it in the past, and some people using it now. Whatever the problem may be with plural "they", it is obviously not that it is an archaism.

The other objection comes from prescriptive grammar: "they" is plural, and that's the end of the story. However, prescriptive grammar has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is descriptive grammar; specifically a description of the grammar of those speakers and writers whose grammar you wish others to emulate. There is nothing sinister here: I teach prescriptive grammar to my students, based on  the usage of academic journals. You want to write like an academic, this is how you do it. (Note that if you really do want to write like an academic, the syntax of that last sentence is not to be emulated.) This brings us back to the Jane Austen defence. While it is true that singular "they" was rejected even by some of Austen's contemporaries (Coleridge, for example, who preferred "it"), anyone who stood up, pounded the lectern, and boomed "That Austen woman does not know the rules of English grammar!" would sound like a complete twit. One might go further and propose that English plural pronouns are not exactly plural; they are non-specific, which is why monarchs and doctors can refer to themselves as "we".

So for what it's worth, my recommendation is that everyone should use whichever pronoun they prefer.

Influences

Many writers have expounded on the figures that influenced them, often bearing out the rule that a dull life can be made more interesting by contact with those who are less dull. However, after musing that we encounter people not only as individuals but as representatives of some group, I was prompted to think about the groups of people that have influenced me. Here are some of them, in approximate chronological order.

School Bullies
A school isn't a school without a school bully, whether it be the suave, sadistic Flashman type or the usual lump of lard who picks on smaller children because the ones with longer legs call him "fatso" and run away quickly. Bullies are educational in a number of ways, chief of which is introducing children to the idea that adults tell them lies. One of the most stupid is that if you ignore bullies, they will go away. If you ignore bullies, they torture you until you sit up and pay attention. Another piece of advice you are given is that if you hit a bully (or even call him "fatso" and run like Hell), you are sinking to his level. This is like saying that the French Resistance sank to the level of the Gestapo because they shot German soldiers.  Just about the only true thing grown-ups tell children about bullies is that bullies are cowards; however, they don't usually follow up that information with useful advice on how to scare a bully. (To my mother's credit, she never inflicted such homilies on me; in fact the only advice I remember on this subject was that if you punch someone in the nose, it will really hurt.)

The bully who contributed most to my education was Clive Waddops, who was not only fat, but tall and (under the fat) rather well-muscled. After taking several beatings from this eight-year-old Stalin, I came across an illustrated article on boxing techniques in my brother's Eagle Annual (which in those days was like a Bible for me). After some practice in the mirror, I accosted Waddops in the playground and waddopped him with a right upper cut. He was nearly knocked out, and after I repeated the experiment a few times during the following week, he was my loyal servant. This taught me that, yes, many bullies really are cowards, and the best way to exploit their cowardice is physical violence. It also taught me that technique beats strength, and may have been the beginning of my interest in martial arts.

Hippies
The main social influence on my teenage years came from Shrewsbury's small hippie community. Since this was the late seventies, most of the hippies still around were in their thirties and had calmed down a little. Most of them had found ways of supporting themselves through crafts, wholefood co-ops and the like, and even those who were living off social security were doing something vaguely useful, so they were a far cry from the wild rovers of the sixties. They introduced me to a lot of good music, wholefoods, sex and funny cigarettes.

One group in particular, who lived in a commune outside town, inspired my youthful enthusiasm for the culture of the previous generation. I was agog at the prospect of rural bliss and what is these days called polyamory. Several long visits convinced me that organic farming is enjoyable but back-breaking and "free love" is as impractical an ideal as life-long monogamy. Both are good for a lively sixteen-year-old, though.

Radical Feminists
Overlapping with Shrewsbury's hippie community was its small but determined radical feminist community, with its even smaller subset of radical lesbians (three, if I remember rightly). I got to know the latter group since Friends of the Earth met in one of their houses for a while. This taught me my first lesson about feminism: a woman who in theory thinks your entire sex should be eliminated, or at least kept chained in the kitchen and forced to make banana bread to atone for patriarchy, will be perfectly nice to you if you happen to be her babysitter. Finding a good babysitter is hard for a radical lesbian feminist mother, since men are worried that she will castrate them, and women are worried that she will either attempt to seduce them or sneer at them for not being radical or lesbian enough. (Things might have changed now, remember this is the 1970s we're talking about.)

The arrangement was that I didn't get paid (which would have been capitulating to the patriarchy or something) but I could eat, drink, read, listen to, or smoke anything I found (so long as I didn't get the verbs mixed up). The result was that I was frequently smashed out my head while listening to Patti Smith and reading feminist tracts. I don't know if this was good for me, but at least it meant that when radical feminism struck terror into men's hearts in the 1980s, turning some of them into banana-bread-making New Men and others into reactionary misogynists, I was all "been there, done that."

Anarchists, and other Revolutionaries
The French president Georges Clemenceau once said "I feel sorry for anyone who wasn't an anarchist when he was twenty." My conversion to anarchism was at the age of fourteen: I read Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, missed a lot of the irony and thought "This is the life for me!" Thirty years later, I don't think of myself as an anarchist in all but the most vague philosophical terms, but I'm still a libertarian and still firmly on the left.

We had a tiny anarchist group in Shrewsbury, which like most revolutionary groups didn't do much more than sell papers and drink beer, and when I went to university I played an active role in Black and Red, an oddball collection of syndicalists, punks and Discordians. They were a great bunch of people, and in addition to selling papers and drinking beer, were fond of political surrealism; their paper, Thoughtcrime, was my introduction to writing political satire. They were also, despite their utopian beliefs, more in touch with reality than most left-wing student groups, particularly the Trotskyists, who seemed to be living in a parallel universe that had branched off from ours some time in the 1920s.

Martial Artists
I started training in the martial arts in 1979 and have been doing so on and off ever since. (I've never mastered any of the martial arts I've dabbled in, though my t'ai chi is passable.) There's not a lot to say here. With a few exceptions, martial artists are fine people. On the whole, they're not just the kind of people you'd want around in a sticky situation, they're the kind of people you wouldn't mind being trapped in a lift with. I suppose the lift might get damaged once you got round to swapping kicking techniques, but at least martial artists usually have enough self-discipline and muscular control not to fart before the rescue team arrives.

The Therapy Crowd
Overlapping with the hippies, feminists and lefties come the disciples of alternative and humanistic psychotherapies. In the early 1980s I was exposed to everything from Rogerian counselling to Reichian massage, and can assure you that Rogers is a lot less painful than Reich. Helped by the fact that my lover in those days was a clinical psychologist, this gave me a fairly good nose for what works and what doesn't in terms of making people happier. A good rule of thumb is that if it involves screaming, it doesn't work.

Occultists
In my last year at university, my housemate and I decided to start "dabbling in the occult", as they say. This later put me in touch with a weird collection of witches, pagans, Thelemites, chaos magicians, techno-shamans and what have you. Contrary to what you might expect, I found the hard-core occultists (Thelemites, chaos magicians etc.) the easiest to get along with and the most possessed of critical intelligence, while the New Age, fluffy bunny pagan, goddess-worshipping, heal-the-Earth types were generally well-meaning but irritating airheads. A guest who talks airily about summoning demons can provide amusing after-dinner conversation, but if anyone tells you that your aura needs healing, scream and run out of the room.