In the meantime, those who find themselves using it shouldn't be too hard on themselves. Doing it for themselves: Female shows take TV by storm 1 / 5 Spanish actress Leticia Dolera, shown here embracing her collaborator Celia Freijeiro, dedicated their Canneseries win for 'Perfect. Will themself make a comeback? It's too soon to tell. The exceptions to this rule are the cases in which themself is intentionally used for someone whose preferred pronoun is they. When it's found in a major newspaper, it's almost always in quoted text. Yet themself remains quite rare in published, edited text. In more recent years we've collected a smattering of evidence of it in publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post. A girl once named Helen Walcott, told me (and she was the most popular debutante in Washington one winter) that as soon as she got her man talking about himself she had him cinched and harnessed-they give themself away. Almost anyone under the circumstances would have doubted if were theirs, or indeed if they were themself-but to us it was clear.īoys like to talk about themselves-much more than girls. Most patients experiencing a storm will have a fever, and about half will have some nervous system symptoms, such as headaches, seizures or even a coma, says Randy Cron, a paediatric rheumatologist. Here it is in use by two well-known American writers:Īfter infinite wanderings the little note has reached us…. Meanwhile, themself was used for the plural from at least 1382 (and possibly for close to 200 years before that), and for the singular from around 1450.Įventually, themselves became the only accepted form. The earliest evidence of themselves referring to plural they or them is from 1466, and the earliest evidence of themselves referring to singular they or them is from 1529. When people want a reflexive pronoun to go with singular they and them, themself sometimes gets called upon to do the job-though if you're doing the calling upon while typing, your computer/phone/tablet is going to be sure you meant themselves.īut if you'd been typing in the late 1300s, themself would have been the default: it was the only version around until the mid-1400s. Only the dual-purpose your* has two reflexive forms: singular yourself and plural yourselves.Įxcept that's not quite true. You can recognize a reflexive pronoun by its second half: they all end in -self or -selves. As singular 'they' becomes more popular, 'themself' is also gaining traction.Ī reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that refers back to the subject of a sentence or clause.
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