Mind your language
I SHOULD think that most of us in speech use they to mean 'he' or `she'; it comes in handy when we do not wish to specify the sex.
I have just come across a nice exam- ple of they in a Dorothy L. Sayers detec- tive novel, Unnatural Death (1927), written before many of us were born. Lord Peter Wimsey is consulting a cler- gyman about the morality of killing someone with a fatal illness. The clergy- man says: 'The consequence you men- tion — this thing which the sick person wants done — does the other person stand to benefit by it, may I ask?'
Lord Peter, not wanting to give any hint of the identity of the person involved, answers: 'Yes. That's just it. He — she — they do.'
You can call the usage wrong if you like, but stranger things have happened in the development of English. Who would have thought, for example, that the apparently intrinsically singular one could acquire a plural, ones, as in: 'I like the big ones'?
On another subject, the Teletubby kind of iterative formation (as in Tinky- Winky or Laa Laa), a reader, W.W. Stevens, of Auckland, New Zealand, writes to tell me of the origin of the now quite ordinary Christian name Wendy. It appears, of course, as the name of one of the children in Peter Pan.
But J.M. Barrie had first used Wendy as a pet name for the daughter of W. E. Henley — a poet who, I think, is not much read these days. The little girl's name was really Margaret, but Barrie, in his rather creepy way, called her Wendy as a short form of Fwendy-wendy. How different to think of that pugnacious gynaecologist, Wendy Savage, for exam- ple, as Fwendy-wendy Savage.
Dot Wordsworth
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