People say that but I think it's gaslighting. I got marked down for using singular "they" in any writing I did in school in the 1980s. I didn't start to see it as a common "gender neutral" pronoun in professional writing (e.g. newspapers) until the last 20 years or so, and really not commonly until the past decade. It still trips me up when I see it used, I have to go back and make sure I didn't miss that more than one person was being discussed.
I suppose one could go back and look at popular style guides from the 1980s and 1990s and see if they endorsed it.
They were teaching us that in the 1980s, yes, but it was an overcorrection. They also taught us not to split our infinitives. That was BS as well. I see no need to maintain standards that were originally imposed by grammarians who undervalued English and overvalued Latin. These days we would call that linguistic insecurity.
Indeed, a lot of grammatical “rules” of English were a result of attempting to impose Latin grammatical rules upon English as part of the neoclassical movement of the 18th century. Split infinitives, dangling prepositions (English is somewhat of an outlier among Indo-European languages in that it lacks the practice of prefixing verbs with prepositions to form new verbs—consider e.g., Czech odjit (jit + od), Spanish contener (tener + con), Latin exeo (eo + ex), Greek καταστρέφω (στρέφω + κᾰτᾰ)¹) so arguably, phrase like “go with” fulfill that role and are not prepositions lacking an accompanying noun.
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1. While in most languages, this class of verbs becomes apparent when the base noun is irregular or has special conjugation rules, in Greek,² it’s especially noticeable thanks to the fact that the aorist causes a morphological change to the beginning of the verb as well as the end. Except for these verbs, the morphological change ends up happening in the middle of the verb.
2. I don’t know modern Greek beyond what I can discern from my classical Greek knowledge, so I don’t know if modern Greek has retained this feature.
> I got marked down for using singular "they" in any writing I did in school in the 1980s.
And your teacher would presumably have marked down Shakespeare for the same thing. If it was good enough for Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Austin, you'd think it would be good enough for your teacher, but we went through a particularly prescriptive period in the early to mid 20th century (though your teacher was maybe slightly behind the times even in the 80s).
People say that but I think it's gaslighting. I got marked down for using singular "they" in any writing I did in school in the 1980s. I didn't start to see it as a common "gender neutral" pronoun in professional writing (e.g. newspapers) until the last 20 years or so, and really not commonly until the past decade. It still trips me up when I see it used, I have to go back and make sure I didn't miss that more than one person was being discussed.
I suppose one could go back and look at popular style guides from the 1980s and 1990s and see if they endorsed it.
They were teaching us that in the 1980s, yes, but it was an overcorrection. They also taught us not to split our infinitives. That was BS as well. I see no need to maintain standards that were originally imposed by grammarians who undervalued English and overvalued Latin. These days we would call that linguistic insecurity.
Indeed, a lot of grammatical “rules” of English were a result of attempting to impose Latin grammatical rules upon English as part of the neoclassical movement of the 18th century. Split infinitives, dangling prepositions (English is somewhat of an outlier among Indo-European languages in that it lacks the practice of prefixing verbs with prepositions to form new verbs—consider e.g., Czech odjit (jit + od), Spanish contener (tener + con), Latin exeo (eo + ex), Greek καταστρέφω (στρέφω + κᾰτᾰ)¹) so arguably, phrase like “go with” fulfill that role and are not prepositions lacking an accompanying noun.
⸻
1. While in most languages, this class of verbs becomes apparent when the base noun is irregular or has special conjugation rules, in Greek,² it’s especially noticeable thanks to the fact that the aorist causes a morphological change to the beginning of the verb as well as the end. Except for these verbs, the morphological change ends up happening in the middle of the verb.
2. I don’t know modern Greek beyond what I can discern from my classical Greek knowledge, so I don’t know if modern Greek has retained this feature.
> I got marked down for using singular "they" in any writing I did in school in the 1980s.
And your teacher would presumably have marked down Shakespeare for the same thing. If it was good enough for Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Austin, you'd think it would be good enough for your teacher, but we went through a particularly prescriptive period in the early to mid 20th century (though your teacher was maybe slightly behind the times even in the 80s).
thankfully, "the enemy can't disseminate bad grammar on the internet if you disable his hand!" =)