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J.Randolph Radney's List: Language and languages
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The hard out I heard on the phone, though, wasn’t being marked for me as ironic or unusual. It was just a usage new to me but not to the speaker. Only one of us was comfortable with it.
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So if and when I begin saying that I have a hard out at 10:45, somebody please stop me. It’s not the shock of the new. It’s the shock of the new-to-thee, the awful realization that something that’s pretty unattractive language-wise is being cooked up and catching on, whether you like it or not.
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As English teachers, one of our responsibilities is to ensure that students master the conventions of standard edited English, so that they will not be judged in negative ways based on their formal writing. Whether it is fair or not, others (including other teachers and future employers) may judge a construction like singular they as “wrong”—as evidence that a writer is not well trained and “does not know better.”
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I tell students that they are welcome to use singular they in writing for my class, but they should footnote it the first time they use it and in the footnote explain their rationale for using singular they.
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