The other key defect in the argument against singular they is that most people already use it so naturally that they don’t even realize they’re doing it. (I’ve used singular they once in this chapter so far—100 points to anyone who finds it.) English speakers have been using they as a singular pronoun to refer to someone whose gender is unknown to them ever since the days of Middle English (“Someone left their goblet in the gatehouse”). If we’re talking grammar rules, singular they was considered perfectly acceptable as a generic third-singular pronoun all the way up until the late eighteenth
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