On Thu, 10 Dec 1998, Dan Lester wrote:

> At 08:59 PM 12/10/98 -0500, Roger Fajman wrote:
> >I and a number of other people like to use "they" instead of "he" or
> >"she" when the gender is not known.  I know it's not gramatically
> >correct, but it will become accepted eventually if enough people use
> >the word that way.  It has the advantage of already being the plural
> >form.  The same thing can be done with "their" in place of "his" or
> >"hers".
>
> Ah, well......just two more steps to the further bastardization of the
> language.....and good luck to the future English teachers who try to teach
> agreement....

The use of singular (generic) "they/them/their" has been around since the
14th century. You will find it in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Lord
Byron, Thackeray, George Orwell, . . .

It has yet to bastardize the language. It is simply a reflection of a
glaring lack in English. The use of generic "he" is also old, but it was
only one of several workarounds that writers tried. It wasn't until around
1800 that grammarians (male, of course) decided that "he" was the "best
solution" to the problem. But the opinion of a few grammarians has carried
only so much weight with the speakers of the language itself. Few of us
are comfortable referring to someone of unspecified gender as "he."

There have been occasional efforts to introduce a new, gender-neutral
pronoun into the language--some languages, including Finnish, have
one--but nothing has caught on. So we all muddle on, doing the best we can
with the language we have to work with.

Personally, I don't understand all the fuss about singular "they." After
all, we use "you" for both singular and plural. At one time "you were" was
used only in reference to more than one "you"; "you was" was used when
speaking to a single person. "You was" has been lost, and we function
quite well (and make ourselves perfectly clear) with only "you were,"
whether we're speaking of one person or more than one. Why not do the same
with "they"?

Jane (an editor)