We referring to teachers as “it” now?
Damn. Underpaid and dehumanized all at once. That’s gotta be rough.
Pfft, rest of the world should start following Finns on this and call everyone and everything ‘it’! Except pets for some reason.
As a non-native speaker, referring to a single teacher as “they” is not very intuitive (although correct)…
I very much agree. Learning English as a foreign language, it feels very wrong to use plural for a single person. I’m still not quite used to it! Although, had I been taught that early on, I doubt it would feel any weirder than using “you are” for a single person.
Funny, English is also my second language but in my first language ‘she’ and plural ‘they’ are the same word, only distinguished by the verb, so it never seemed that weird to me.
I find it most inconvenient when “they” is used to refer to one person and a group in the same paragraph.
And that’s actually a pretty recent development. Less than a decade ago, I remember getting marked down in English class for using “they” as a genderless singular pronoun, as my elderly teacher grew up only ever using “they” to refer to a group.
It’s not plural though. It’s just the third person neuter pronoun. Singular “they” has been a thing in English for centuries, and has only been controversial among a small segment of the population for a very short time.
Think of it a bit like French “vous”. That’s a “plural” (second person) pronoun, but is also used in the singular. In the French case, it’s used as a singular formal second person pronoun in addition to a plural second person pronoun. Nobody in France is getting up in arms about how you shouldn’t use “vous” when talking to one person.
is not very intuitive though
Yes it is. It’s completely intuitive. Native English speakers do it all the time every day. The singular “they” is used literally without conscious thought. The only time it becomes controversial is with transphobes talking about specific people who do not identify with their gender assigned at birth. Even transphobes use singular “they” without thinking in contexts like this OP where the gender is unknown. (Which is why their “but it’s bad grammar!” arguments fall flat.)
I’d say what’s intuitive is very subjective. Most of a language tends to be intuitive to its native speakers, no matter how unintuitive it seems to someone else.
To me the intuitive genderless option for “he/she” would be “it”. Coming from Finnish, it seems much more natural to have “it” include people instead of using “they” for both singular and plural. Or if using “they”, it would feel intuitive to say “they is” instead of “they are”.
Just because people with years of experience with something don’t have to think about it, doesn’t mean it’s intuitive.
As a non-native speaker, I don’t find it intuitive at all, even though I don’t have to think about it anymore. And as you can see by their post, OP didn’t find it intuitive either.
“it’s” own money? I’m assuming you meant “its” but even then your teacher is an object?
Anyone who thinks this has never hosted a birthday party for a bunch of grade schoolers. I get enough pizza so they can have a couple of full pizza slices each, they take a few bites, then immediately go back to goofing around with their friends.
Then I have leftover pizza for a long time. XD
I think the joke is that a lot of us were little shits that didn’t appreciate some of the only adults that cared to see us succeed.
It’s all about the intentions. Not the quantity.
For some reason those school party pizzas tasted so much better than normal
I feel like pizza always tastes a little better in social settings. Does anyone else feel that?
