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Could Everyone Bring Their Own Money?

For thousands of years, in dozens of cultures, the word “he” was understood to refer in certain contexts to both men and women. Similarly, the word “man” is often understood to refer to mankind or humanity. Readers understood that Everyone will bring his own money meant that women would still be expected to buy their own drinks.

However, many women came to resent being casually lumped together into the same pronoun with all those Y-chromosome carriers. They clamored for gender-neutral language. Soon, gender-neutral writers began to write sentences like “ Everyone will bring his or her own money.”

While this usage solves the problem of assuming that “him” automatically includes “her”, it creates a different problem: The use of “his or her” is incredibly tedious. It makes sentence structure more complex and strikes many readers as faintly ridiculous. This is why many writers resorted to the gender-free pronouns they/their in their quest for linguistic emancipation. So we traversed the distance from

Everyone brought his own money.
to
Everyone brought his or her own money.
to
Everyone brought their own money.

which was a little silly, since in every case women still had to buy their own drinks. Moreover, everyone brought their own money led to what seemed to be a fundamental grammatical error. It matched the singular pronoun everyone to the plural pronoun their. This is against one of the Top Ten Commandments of Good Writing: “Thou shalt not match a singular noun to a plural pronoun or verb.” (Maybe it’s in the Top Twenty or Thirty Commandments, but it is right up there.)

For people who care deeply about getting grammar right, and about the integrity of the language, and about the growing laziness, imprecision and spineless ambiguity that permeates public discourse everywhere, every variant of Everyone brought their own anything is a painful reminder of everything that is wrong with America today.

Correcting the Error

These singular-plural mismatches can usually be corrected in one of two ways:

1. Make the subject of the sentence plural and thereby avoid the problem altogether. So you might rewrite the offending sentence as
All of the guests brought their own money.
2. Recast the sentence so that it doesn’t use personal pronouns at all, as in
Everyone brought money.

Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker reports that there is a valid linguistic basis for sentences like “Everyone brought their own money.” (For a detailed explanation, see his book, The Language Instinct.) Does that mean that you should start propagating sentences about everyone doing their own thing, or being their own person, or whatever? Not necessarily. Making the whole sentence plural, or depersonalizing it altogether, is still the more prudent choice. But then, everyone has their own opinion on this topic.