Since 1906, The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) has been a standard resource for writers, editors, and publishers of American English. The print release of the 18th edition on September 19 (it is also available online) gives the linguist in me the opportunity to comment on changes that have been introduced since the previous edition’s publication in 2017. Some of these changes are of interest only to pedants; others are evidently of greater importance.
In the first category: The world is surely split between those who are and those who are not amused to learn that Chicago now counsels lowercasing “continent” in “Antarctic continent” but capitalizing “Agreement” in “the Munich Agreement.” Other changes of this kind include capitalizing “[t]he first letter of a complete sentence following a colon,” permitting writers to start a sentence with “[t]erms that consist of a combination of numerals and words (e.g., ‘7-Eleven’),” and preferring to “plac[e] acknowledgments in the back matter rather than in the front matter for most types of books (CMOS itself is an exception).”
Among the issues in the second category is the role of artificial intelligence, a subject unmentioned in the edition of just seven years ago. The 18th’s preface notes, “As the revision was nearing completion, the emerging role of AI (artificial intelligence) in writing, editing, and publishing prompted some additional changes.” These changes address copyright, the crediting of AI-generated images, and “how to cite text generated by a chatbot.” It’s going to take more than Russell David Harper and his Windy City team to convince students—and others—to acknowledge their use of ChatGPT and related tools, but it’s a start.
Then there are pronouns. My own interest in this part of speech may be unusual. But everyone ought to care about this dusty academic matter that has unexpectedly become a hot topic in the culture wars. After all, personal pronouns—I, you, he, she, we, they, and the like—are, well, personal: the part of English grammar at the core of how we express our individual selves and what we make of the world, including billions of other individual selves, around us.
Consider the table of forms of the third-person singular personal pronouns in CMOS’s 15th (2003), 16th (2010), and 17th editions. The 15th listed he, she, and it as the “nominative” forms; him, her, and it as the “objective” forms; and his, her, hers, and its as the “possessive” forms. The 16th had the same, only it called the last set “genitive” rather than “possessive.” Then the 17th added the reflexives himself, herself, and itself. In the 18th edition, however, we now find as well the singulars they, them, their, theirs, themself, and themselves. There is a footnote to this they: “Now used to refer to a nonbinary person or, in some circumstances, someone whose gender is unknown or unimportant.”
Let’s go back 21 years. Published in this millennium, CMOS’s 15th edition makes no mention of “singular they.” I am not a fan of this usage, but even if I have never used it in formal writing (I suspect I haven’t), it is undeniable that I sometimes use they as a singular in speech—indeed, as Geoff Nunberg wrote with a wink in 2016, “Everyone uses singular ‘they,’ whether they realize it or not.” A glance at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) shows that examples of they used in place of words like everyone have been around since the fourteenth century and that they for a generic or indefinite someone (as in “Be careful about giving money to someone who says they missed the last bus home”) has been around since the fifteenth. The author of the then-new section on grammar and usage in 2003, Bryan A. Garner, was of course aware of all this but emphasized what the editor, Margaret D. F. Mahan, called CMOS’s “conservative approach . . . tempered by pragmatism.” Garner’s long entry for they in the 5th edition (2022) of his invaluable Garner’s Modern English Usage (MEU) provides an excellent history of the issues, especially in the pronominally tumultuous past decade.
In any case, since its 16th edition, CMOS has included one or more paragraphs specifically on singular they. In 2010, the message was simple: “While this usage is accepted in casual contexts, it is still considered ungrammatical in formal writing.” In 2017, however, CMOS brought in a very different kind of singular they: a pronoun for a specific person who identifies as nonbinary or gender-nonconforming, a brand-new usage that the OED first records in a tweet from just eight years earlier. And CMOS made the remarkable—decidedly unconservative—decision to accept this they while still pushing back against the well-established generic usage of singular they that has been around for well over half a millennium. That usage, CMOS stated at the time, is accepted “in speech and in informal writing,” but
it is only lately showing signs of gaining acceptance in formal writing . . . , where Chicago recommends avoiding its use . . . . When referring specifically to a person who does not identify with a gender-specific pronoun, however, they and its forms are often preferred. . . . In general, a person’s stated preference for a specific pronoun should be respected.
Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that CMOS in 2024 finally accepts generic singular they—“In recent years this usage has become accepted in more formal contexts . . . , and Chicago now endorses it”—as well as stating, with stronger language than previously, that “[i]f an individual is known to use they and its forms as their personal pronouns rather than the gendered he or she, this usage should be respected.” Among these forms is themself, though CMOS notes parenthetically that “some people will prefer themselves.”
The preface to the new edition contains the following long sentence:
We now also endorse the use of singular they as needed to refer not only to someone who is nonbinary but also to anyone whose gender is unknown or irrelevant (or concealed for reasons of privacy), a natural development in a language that lacks a dedicated gender-neutral pronoun for people—and one that increasingly reflects real-world usage.
Though grammatically ambiguous, the clause that begins “a natural development” probably refers only to “anyone whose gender is unknown” rather than to both this and “someone who is nonbinary.” Either way, what is important to note is that while the one is indeed a natural development, the other is not. Garner in MEU quotes from a letter that the distinguished linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum—certainly no conservative—sent to him in 2021: Using they to refer to “a single specific individual who purports not to be locatable within the familiar male/female/neuter ontology” is, according to Pullum, “a radical break with all previous English grammar, pushed by a sudden enthusiasm for nonbinarity in sexual identity.”
We are going to see a lot more about pronouns in the 19th edition of CMOS, which I imagine will appear in 2031. The growth industry may be neopronouns (a word not yet in the OED). On this subject, the 17th edition stated simply, “A number of other gender-neutral singular pronouns [aside from they and its paradigm] are in use, invented for that purpose,” while the 18th uses the term “neopronouns” and gives a concrete example: “Some people use neopronouns such as ze/zir/zirs/zirself.”
Meanwhile, as something of a conservative pragmatist, I counsel speakers not to allow themselves to be bullied into using they to refer to a specific individual—or ze, for that matter. The time may come when this is culturally and linguistically widely accepted. But we are a long way from that point, and CMOS should not be putting its 1,200-page thumb so firmly on this contentious scale.
Photo: The University of Chicago Press, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
