THIRD PERSON PLURAL

“This machine is out of order. An engineer has been called and is on their way.”

I couldn’t take a photo of it at the time because my phone was out of battery, but this printed notice, blu-tacked to a petrol-station coffee-machine, intrigued me for a full five minutes the other day.

“is on... their way...” I mulled, tapping an unbought Bounty into the palm of my hand. 

There has to be a word for this PC-art of switching-pronouns-to-the-non-gender specific-third-person-plural-so-as-not-to-offend-anybody.

Granted, a female engineer might have turned up and been (rightly) off-put by the assumption that all engineers are men. “On ‘his’ way” would not have been right at all in the Twenty First Century, would it?

Similarly, “on ‘her’ way” would have been just as sexist, I think, or at best, somebody trying too hard to be forward-thinking. Of course it would also indicate that the person who had quickly typed that out and printed it onto A4 in size 30 Calibri, was fully aware that a definite, real, and expected, female engineer was already in the van, and weaving through the traffic to get there to fix it. In a way, I think I would have found ‘her’ more reassuring than ‘his’ for that reason, which, the more I think about it, might make me a little bit sexist too.

I don’t know who turned up to fix the coffee-machine. I was there for petrol and a Bounty, which by now was getting a bit deformed, and anyway, I wasn’t going to wait that long.

What I do know though, is that the third person plural, is usually, well, plural. The notion that one solo engineer could be on ‘their’ way suddenly didn’t seem right at all. Can an astronaut have their space shuttle? Can a teacher have their class? Can a grammar-nerd have their cake and eat it? Er... well, sort of yes. This is confusing.

The problem here I think is that ‘to be on one’s way’ is one of those idiomatic phrases that naturally includes a personal pronoun. “I am on my way” is most common, followed by “we are on our way” and so on. In each case, it’s very obvious who might be on whose way, and often in common usage, you’d be referring to a very specific person or persons and the pronouns would match.

“Where’s Geoff? He’s late again.”

“Oh don’t worry. He just texted; he’s on his way!”

Good old Geoff.

Here though, nobody is actually sure which engineer will turn up! They just phoned and asked for one, I imagine. It might be Geoff; it might be Debs. It might be Tarquin, Kelly, Linus, Dennis, Sue, or even Signor Lavazza himself for all we know. So the safest thing is to switch to ‘their’ and then we’ve got all the bases covered, right?

The Tech Author in me, who was surprisingly awake (and unwilling to plump for the he/she combination), came up with two solutions. The chances are you probably have too, or you’re more than likely just not that bothered.

Anyway, I would go for:

“The engineers have been called and are on their way” - eliminating the assumption that only one of them is coming and what gender they are. Or...

“An engineer has been called and is on the way.” - not specifying whether the engineer was on anybody’s particular way at all, but importantly, would still be able to fix the problem either way.

I paid for my petrol and my late-night Bounty and didn’t really think any more of it. Did it matter? Did anyone care so long as they could get a hot coffee with their tank of super unleaded?

That last question rattled around in my head for a while as I thought about it, word by word. Then I just laughed at myself in the rear view mirror, started the engine and drove off.