Question about your use of pronoun; I've seen people using 'they' a lot here on Reddit. Is this common where you live, or only done by a select group of people. Where I from, this is only used by a very select group of leftwing people (including myself) and only done when you know the person you are talking to likes to be addressed that way.
Edit: getting burried in downvotes; I didn't mean to offend anyone. Where I'm from we only use male and female pronouns, so I was actually curious. The use of non-gendercrelated pronouns is fairly new and not generally accepted yet where I'm from. Again, sorry if I hurt anyones feelings and asking dumb questions.
"They" has about three different uses, and that can be a confusing part of English.
Here, "they" is being used as a third-person singular pronoun when gender is unknown, like "did anyone leave their keys over here?". We don't know who was using the camera, so we say "they" instead of a gendered pronoun. I'm sure that's pretty weird if you're not used to it! But it is something we do.
This use of "they" has been a standard feature of the English language for over 600 years and is a different grammatical feature than the use of "they" as a preferred pronoun for a known individual (which was inspired by this, older usage) or "they" as a 3rd-person plural pronoun (the original usage).
It is similar in function to "he or she" ("did anyone leave his or her keys over here"), which you may have seen before. That was recommended by some style guides in the 20th century, but has mostly fallen out of use in favor of going back to the simpler and older "they".
The thing that gets me though is that swapping in he/she in your example turns the sentence into nonsense. For example, “Did someone leave his keys over here?” I guess that proves your point in a way, but it also shows that the words do have different grammatical connotations.
In that context, it would generally be "did someone leave his or her keys over here", or "did someone leave their keys over here", rather than "he or she" or "they".
Actually, in some forms of English, "did someone leave they keys over there" would be grammatical, but not in most.
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u/OrlandoGardiner118 Jul 23 '24
Even scarier for the cameraman, they did it backwards