Tom Scott

Gender Neutral Pronouns: They're Here, Get Used To Them (2013x11)

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CORRECTIONS March 9th, 2019 Back in 2013, I made a video about ‘singular they’ and gender-neutral pronouns. Looking back on it with half a decade of hindsight, there are several things I want to correct. I also have a few thoughts on how the reactions to it have changed over time, and why the video’s comments will remain off. Firstly, while editing the video, I cut the first sentence of the script. That sentence didn’t seem to add anything, and I’m a believer in ‘don’t bore us, get to the chorus’. That would have been fine — if only the script didn’t refer back to that first sentence later on, noting that the viewer probably didn’t notice the singular they in it. There used to be an annotation explaining that mistake, but YouTube’s deleted all annotations now. I regret the error. Secondly, I mentioned that recently-coined gender-neutral prounouns (hir, xe, etc) haven’t caught on in regular usage, and that trying to deliberately add new words into a language is extremely difficult.