The Mast-Head: It Versus They

So what has happened with that good old-fashioned word “it”? You would think that so useful a word would not go out of style or be forgotten. But, if listening to such well-regarded sources as National Public Radio news is any illustration, it has been almost fully supplanted by “they.”

I blame the Supreme Court, in part. In its (notice that?) Citizens United decision, the justices all but handed full personhood to corporations back in 2010. The trickle-down has been significant and to some ears, mine included, extremely annoying. Everything from multinational manufacturers to federal agencies are referred to as “they” when they, by all rights, should always be “it.”

In its proper usage, they is the third person plural pronoun “used to represent persons or things last mentioned or implied” or “unspecified persons or people in general,” in a lovely old American Heritage dictionary that I keep in my office.

It seems to me to be crossing a line for organizations like NPR’s news programs, for example, to subtly side with the court in helping to support the concept that corporations and giant bureaucracies are people, too.

Webster’s dictionary takes a decent crack at the they/it collective noun conundrum: “It is treated as singular when the collective is thought of as a whole and as plural when the individual members are thought of as acting separately.” So, following that rule, most of the time singular entities like the Ford Motor Company or the Food and Drug Administration should be referred to as “it” for short. Human beings acting in some fashion within each organization would be referred to as they.

Here is one recent example from “All Things Considered” that I remembered from a drive-time listening session and looked up once I got back to the office: “Analysts had been expecting the Fed to signal it would hike rates around the middle of next year by removing from their statement language suggesting they would hold rates near zero. . . .” The reporter for the story, John Ydstie, managed to get it both right and wrong all in the same sentence.

Language changes, of course, and this is one curmudgeons like me cannot hope to win — especially when the highest court in the land disagrees and Facebook constantly reminds us that a friend has a birthday: “Wish them a happy birthday today.”