Comment by renewiltord
7 months ago
The grammar is fine. Saying "the pilot did not listen to the instructor sitting next to them" is perfectly fine in English and has been so since at least the '90s when I first learned the language as a child.
7 months ago
The grammar is fine. Saying "the pilot did not listen to the instructor sitting next to them" is perfectly fine in English and has been so since at least the '90s when I first learned the language as a child.
Singular they has always been valid in modern English, going back to before Shakespeare (he used it a couple of times). The idea that it isn't comes from contrarian mid-18th-century prescriptivists who wanted to actively change the language people were already using.
It's been perfectly fine at least as far back as the 14th century.
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At best, the use of singular they is far more complicated than you're stating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
a Wikipedia link means nothing, especially in the context of politically charged grammar. You can't link most conservative papers on Wikipedia, and some of the founders regularly acknowledge the site is heavily biased.
I mean that article claims singular they was common through the 19th and 20th century, but we see that's not true through any dictionary lookup https://www.websters1913.com/words/They
They (thā), pron. pl.; poss. Theirs; obj. Them. [Icel. þeir they, properly nom. pl. masc. of sā, sū, þat, a demonstrative pronoun, akin to the English definite article, AS. sē, seó, ðæt, nom. pl. ðā. See That.] The plural of he, she, or it. They is never used adjectively, but always as a pronoun proper, and sometimes refers to persons without an antecedent expressed.
Using they to refer to someone when you don't want to acknowledge their gender is a very recent thing, only done by the politically motivated.
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