Google+ is on a roll. Having learned from Wave's failed adoption there's a lot of engineering and development going on. This week they're rolling out a new contact importer and a privacy setting for gender, for those for whom it's a sensitive topic.
Like Facebook, Google+'s notification system is conversational. "Alan shared a photo with his circles," which, if Alan were to decide to keep his gender private, would then become "Alan has shared a photo with their circles."
In the words of the Googler who announced the feature, Frances Haugen: “Controlling privacy is more important than being grammatically correct."
Is it wrong, though?
The pronoun they has a very fluid place in the culture of English-speaking nations. Officially it's third-person plural, but it's also used as a third-person singular pronoun if the subject's gender is unknown. And further, it's used for vague abstracts that can be described in singular or plural.
From the play Ceasar and Cleopatra:
"No, Cleopatra. No man goes to battle to be killed.""But they do get killed!"
This use of they, and its gender-neutral application, is disputable. By the letter of grammatical law, the above example should be wrong -- but it doesn't feel wrong. Ceasar wasn't talking about a man, he was talking about men but chose a more elegant sentence structure to express his thought, which Cleopatra correctly interpreted.
Ah, Google. You've made me more interested in modern grammar and syntax than the evolution of social networking, and given my background in New Media, that's impressive. Firsth +You vs +Usted, then you defined +1 as a verb and charted the correct conjugations, and now you're putting proper thought in the role of gender in your automation systems.
Google, you rock.
Sorry, I mean they rock.
- Alex
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