Singular they and the best referee
(24 June 2026)
I wondered,
Is it really necessary to use ‘they’ for a singular third person whose gender is unknown? Isn’t there, or has there never been in the history of this language, a better alternative: one of those that are ideal but nowadays sound ‘formal’, ‘old-fashioned’, ‘elitist’, ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ and so on — that is, the best and most natural option but demanding for the speaker and/or somewhat controversial?
Before posting my question here, I googled the italicised part and Google’s AI showed me this:
The man in the link writes a long, rambling paragraph praising they to the skies without even bothering to mention which option is being dismissed. I suppose it’s the his in the phrase he hastily quotes: ‘Everyone loves his mother’. That explains a lot.
Until now I had managed, sometimes with convoluted constructions, to avoid using they as a singular; now I know there is a better option without having to avoid the regular grammatical structure.
(Good for Tennessee in 1925, by the way).
(6 July 2026)
Last weekend, a commentator during a World Cup match brought me back to the issue of the singular they.
In English, if you say that a certain person is ‘the best referee [in a certain aspect]’, it is understood that he (or she — never they!) is the best in absolute terms, including both men and women. Spanish is different. The masculine forms of the article and noun are unmarked: it can refer to people of either sex, whereas the feminine form implies an exclusively female group.
The commentator surely wanted to praise the fact that the woman refereeing the match was the best — in a certain aspect of refereeing — of all the referees, but in his eagerness to also praise the fact that she was a woman, he used the article and noun in the feminine form, so that what he actually said was that she was — merely — the best of the female referees.