Chicken-fried Bible translation

An old friend (or should I say, a friend I haven't seen in awhile!), Beth Keck, checked in to my last post and left a comment which I figure combines that post with thoughts on the TNIV debate: "Everyone should leave their car at home..." Which got me thinking....

Yes, everyone should leave his/her/their car at home, or as they say in the South, "Y'all leave y'all's cah righchair!" Maybe we should have more Southerners on the Bible translation teams--thus Rev 3:20 could be rendered, "If any y'all opens the door, I'd be much obliged to have some of y'all's chicken-fried steak." Everyone in the South knows that "y'all" is singular, and is gender neutral. For the plural, you have to use 'All y'all.' My brother-in-law taught me that. I reckon it might could work for Bible translation.

But seriously, English as spoken by a significant portion of the population, be it Southern, or youth, or those without a prescriptive approach to grammar, have known for years that 'they' (or the handy second person pronoun 'y'all') can be singular or plural, depending on context. While I have spent most of my life as a prescriptivist, fighting the tides of 'bad' grammar, correcting my students' English, Greek, Latin, French, whatever, I have to admit that the grammatical descriptivists (i.e. those who deal with grammar as it is, not as it should be) on the TNIV translation team have a point.

That said, I might have opted for the first person plural: "If anyone opens the door, I will come in and we can share a meal together." Or the second person (which in standard English is quite ambiguous as to number): "I will eat with you and you with me."

I still hear nails on the chalkboard with the anyone/they shift, or the anyone/you shift, even though I realize very very few people share that twitchiness! I came to the realization some time ago that due to huge cultural shifts, the English language has become genderfied, or genderized, or gendered. Thus what used to be heard honestly as a neutral term (anyone/he/his) is now heard as a gendered term. I don't know if we can go back to the days of innocent ears and people who didn't hear 'him' as 'not her.' There truly was a time when 'he' could function as a singular of the neutral 'they.' Sadly, I think those times are gone. I think in large part the politics of gender is to blame. In some ways, we have been taught that we ought to hear things through a gendered filter. So even I now hear "brother" and think "not sister," or "son" and hear "not daughter."

But how do I deal with my grammarized ears? I wince whenever I hear the shift from singular (anyone) to plural (they). But I say it . . . .