Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

mistakes in the third person plural

Languagehat has pointed us towards a nice article by jjoan ttaber, a linguist, on the vexing pseudo-problem of the singular pronoun they. What I want to write about here is something worse than creeping grammatical laxity and linguistic political correctness. I'm sure everybody is aware that there is a spectre haunting the English language and its name is the incorrect plural pronoun they. That's right, you heard me: they is not the correct pronoun to use when speaking or writing anaphorically of two or more third persons. Ye gods! you cry. Tell me it ain't so, Jim Uncle. Well, 'tis so, dammit! Back in the good old pre-PC days of Anglo-Saxon yore—earlier spelling gore—we had a pronominal paradigm that looked like this:

But then those pesky Vikings, squatting up in the Yorky Danelaw, brought in their they, along with lutefisk and free love, and the English upper classes, hoping to kiss up to some Old Norse hiney, started using the new-fangled they rather than the correct and homegrown híe. Political correctness being what it was in the thirteenth century, soon all the English were doing it. Yeesh! I move that all right-thinking prescriptive grammarians herewith stop using the noxious they and hie themselves over to the pure and beautiful hie. Arguing that we've been using they since at least the 13th century doesn't make it right! The fate of the free world's tongue depends on it. And thank your lucky stars that some true anglophones have been brave enough to use the oblique form of hie all along in the form of 'em. As for the rest of 'em, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke!