every time I use “they” to refer to a single gender-unknown person on Tumblr, another piece of my grammar-filled heart shatters, and the pieces scatter at the bottom of hell
“They” has been a singular pronoun for hundreds of years, you melodramatic dipshit.
well… actually… no… they is plural. people use they when they should use he, she, or it.
dense motherfucker, the pronoun “they” is an english equivalent for the third person indefinite singular and has been for literally centuries. it remains morphologically and syntactically plural therefore you don’t need to shit your little pantaloons at compromising your surely rock solid grammar rules.
i guarantee every fuckin time you’ve ever had to refer to a person of an unknown gender you’ve used “they” subconsciously. (“The post clerk gave me a message for you.” “Oh, what did they say?”) but you only have a problem with it when people specify it as a pronoun for themselves because you’re a shitlord i fuckin guess.
“Eche on in þer craft ys wijs.” (“Each one in their craft is wise.”) — [Wycliffe’s Bible], Ecclus. 38.35 (1382)[19]
“And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, They wol come up…” Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales (circa 1400)[20] quoted by Jespersen and thence in Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage.[21]
“Eche of theym sholde … make theymselfe redy.” — Caxton, Sonnes of Aymon (c. 1489)[22]“If a person is born of a … gloomy temper … they cannot help it.” — Chesterfield, Letter to his son (1759);[23] quoted in Fowler’s.[24]
“A person can’t help their birth.” — Rosalind in W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848);[25] quoted from the OED by Curzan in Gender Shifts in the History of English.[26]
“Now nobody does anything well that they cannot help doing” — Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (1866);[27] quoted in Fowler’s.[24]
“Nobody in their senses would give sixpence on the strength of a promissory note of the kind.” — Bagehot, The Liberal Magazine (1910);[28] quoted in Fowler’s.[29]”
* Additional examples, NOT presented chronologically:
“‘Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear the speech.” — Shakespeare, Hamlet (1599)
“Every one must judge according to their own feelings.” — Lord Byron, Werner (1823),[44] quoted as “Every one must judge of [sic] their own feelings.”[45]
“Had the Doctor been contented to take my dining tables as any body in their senses would have done …” — Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814);[46][45]
“If the part deserve any comment, every considering Christian will make it to themselves as they go …” — Daniel Defoe, The Family Instructor (1816);[47][45]
“Every person’s happiness depends in part upon the respect they meet in the world …” — William Paley[48][45]
*
“In the 14th edition (1993) of The Chicago Manual of Style, the University of Chicago Press explicitly recommended using singular they and their, noting a “revival” of this usage and citing “its venerable use by such writers as Addison, Austen, Chesterfield, Fielding, Ruskin, Scott, and Shakespeare.”[106]
#
Like, spending literally one minute on the internet to confirm (or in this case, disprove) what you blindly *believed* was an actually fact would have saved you from embarrassing yourself in front of…how many notes does this post have now? Well, let’s just call it a staggeringly large number of people.
But at least you provided the internet with a valuable teaching moment.
