The use in prose of the singular “they”—that is, the application of the pronoun “they” to an individual human being whose gender is neither specified nor, at the moment, relevant—tends to raise the eyebrows of many of us of a certain age, because at some point in the journey of our lives we were either taught or simply inferred—because we never saw it used in the books and magazines and newspapers we read—that it was incorrect. What we saw, over and over, was something like this: [A] beginning writer…worries to think of his immaturity, and wonders how he ever dared to think he had a word worth
...more
