Modern Grammar: The Corporate "They"

It's a company thing.

Not to be that guy, but I started using the singular “they” before it was cool.

“Whoever put those trash cans on the curb, they didn’t do a very good job.”

“When someone’s riding a roller coaster, they get their bodies rocked.”

“I think when a lost child sees me, they know they can trust me.” (I was eight.)

Official grammar texts in my high school and early jobs recommended “he” (and “his”) when the gender of the person was unknown. Even then, this idea struck me as pretty sexist. Yeah, maleness has often been a default value in society, but why codify that?

(I thank an open-minded upbringing and a tomboyish best friend for keeping me from falling victim to certain prejudices as a child and teenager, but that’s neither here nor there.)

In later years, the growing prominence of nonbinary people (enbies) pushed the issue further into the light. In 2015 (around the time these comic panels were published), the American Dialect Society endorsed the singular “they,” later recognized as word of the year and word of the decade.

Congratulations, society! Glad you caught up to me there. Admittedly, there are problems with using one pronoun for both singular and plural quantities of unknown people, and for both unknown people and known (nonbinary) people. Neopronouns like “zie” and “zir” sometimes get proposed for the latter.

We tend to overload our words with meanings, which can lead to confusion. But that’s where a lot of wordplay comes from.

Now, if we can only get our spell-checkers to recognize the validity of “themself…”

The only usage of “they” that bugs me has nothing to do with any of that. I should admit, I catch myself doing this as often as I spot others doing it.

“So glad Marvel published those Squirrel Girl comics: it was so forward-thinking of them!”

“Will Google start putting search quality over their profits again? Signs point to no.”

“McDonald’s just raised/lowered their prices.”

A company is not a plural: if it were, it would be companies. A company is not a person, no matter what Citizens United says. Neither singular “they” nor plural “they” is appropriate: a company is and should be an “it.”

I think a yearning for personal connection motivates this misuse. Using “them” to describe McDonald’s, we might picture a sea of people in blue shirts, blue pants, and blue aprons. We interact with companies all the time—sometimes as often as with other people, sometimes more—so it’s natural to assign companies a bit of personhood.

But that’s a treacherous train of thought. You might like the underpaid server who laughs at your Happy Meal joke. But that person is no more “McDonald’s” than I’m “Google” just because I did some work for Google a few years back.

Major decision-making power in a company—profit policy and pricing, for instance—usually rests in a faceless board of directors or an overpaid CEO. Other decisions, like investing in a risky periodical, sometimes go to middle management. But most companies aren’t democracies: it’s rare for all a company’s workers to gather together and agree on anything beyond “Rah, rah, this motivational retreat was a great idea! We are all having fun! (When can we leave?)”

Someone at Marvel was forward-thinking to publish Squirrel Girl, Google is unlikely to deprioritize its profits, and McDonald’s raised its prices.

As a student of language, I’m more descriptivist than prescriptivist. I recognize language often does what it wants despite our efforts. But I wish some grammar textbook publisher would highlight this issue on their pages.

Er, its pages.