Muse back!
August 23, 2008 / Saturday
This Makes No Sense
I'm talking about the following sentence from this article, which revealed Obama's running mate a day early.
The official who spoke did so on condition of anonymity, saying they did not want to pre-empt a text-message announcement the Obama campaign promised for Saturday morning.
You say you don't want to pre-empt the text message announcement, but you just did. Anonymous official, logic is not one of your strong points, is it?
And you just took all the fun out of the whole running mate text message grand reveal thing. Poopiehead.
Comments
=saying they did not=
And one more thing: Do you think that this choice of words strongly suggests that the leaker was female? The correct usage (traditionally) would be "saying he did not" (using "he" as the genderless pronoun), and if the leaker was male the writer would probably have done that without thinking. But in these days it's fallen out of favor to use "he" when you know any of the persons referred to are "shes," and the writer might have felt that "saying she did not" would give away the leaker's identity, so he (the writer, and I'm using using "he" as a genderless pronoun), used "they," figuring then that we wouldn't be able to guess if the leaker was a man or a woman.
Should I have been a detective? Or do I just think too much.
Posted by: gs at August 23, 2008 03:03 PM
Okay, that previous comment makes me sound like an idiot. :) Let's try it again:
"They" is used as the plural pronoun ("The employees have gathered in the cafeteria, and they want...."), and nowadays is also used as the singular pronoun when the gender of the person cannot be known ("Okay, so say a customer comes in, and they tell you....") -- the singular male pronoun used to also be used as the singular genderless pronoun, but this has fallen out of favor for being sexist.
But (my point is), when someone uses "they" as a singular pronoun when they (note "they" used as a singular pronoun) know the gender of the person they are referring to (i.e., they could have used "he" or "she," because they knew which it was), then that suggests that the gender of the person being referred to is female, and the "someone" is afraid to use "she" because that is to "identifying."
As in when you boss comes to you and doesn't want to say, "Someone came to my office and she told me that you..." so they (the boss) says instead, "Someone came to my office and they told me that you...."
Hmmm. Someone shut me up.
Posted by: gs at August 23, 2008 03:38 PM
I thought that too, when I read it. Don't see the use of the ambiguous "they" much in that context.
Posted by: Viv at August 23, 2008 10:16 PM
When my son says stuff like that ("But I DO want to go to the library!"), I say, "No. No, you don't, because if you did, you'd have gotten into the car when I said you had to."
And I say to this leaker, "Yes. Yes, you did want to pre-empt the announcement. If you didn't, you would not have."
-Jennie, trying to live an intentional life
Posted by: Jennie at August 29, 2008 05:29 PM