Andrew Doyle

There’s a moment in Ricky Gervais’s 2018 Netflix stand-up show Humanity when he talks about buying a first-class air ticket, only to be informed that nuts would not be served on board due to a fellow passenger’s serious allergy. ‘I was fuming,’ he says. ‘If being near a nut kills you, do we really want that in the gene pool? I’ve never wanted nuts more. I felt that she was infringing on my human right to eat nuts.’ A member of the public tweeted him directly to complain after hearing him tell this story on The Tonight Show, but instead of apologising Ricky wrote a routine about it. As he points out, when someone is needlessly offended, ‘it makes it funnier’.

Singer Sam Smith has announced that from now on his pronouns are ‘they/them’, sparking an overdue conversation about the social justice movement’s ongoing efforts to influence the way we speak. Of course Smith is free to make his request – just as we are free to decide whether or not to accede – but with such attempts to skip over the natural process of language evolution, where does that leave the teachers whose job it is to uphold basic grammatical standards? The expectation that ‘they’ and ‘them’ should be adopted as singular pronouns in formal speech and writing presents its own set of challenges. We are all aware of the common colloquial usage of ‘they’ as singular in the case of one whose gender is unknown.