You might have heard of that social anarchist who runs Coyote Blog. I wrote a scathing exposé on this scurrilous scofflaw here.
As for coyotes, he seems to think they're a cute, cuddly bunch, but a Google search proves otherwise:
Well, this menace to society is back in the news, again preaching his particular brand of anarchy, this time against the very foundation of our language, and thus society, itself:
By the way, if anyone read the fabulous book "Barbarians and the Gate," they** will remember RJR Nabisco's construction of a...
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** I know this is grammatically incorrect, but I am exhausted with English's lack of a third person singular gender-neutral pronoun and hate saying "he or she." English is a language built bottom up from actual usage, so lacking any better idea, I support "they" as the solution.
I've been using "they" in this regard for over 20 years.
In fact, you could even say that the subject is a part of blog history. As I note in my bio, I was 'blogging' on a daily basis on my BBS a decade before the word was coined. In one of the first pages I wrote for the board, the 'Welcome' page, I told everyone that they'd see two variations from standard English in my articles; using 'they' for 'he or she' and putting punctuation outside of quote marks. (I'll cover the latter some other time.) So it could be said that one of the first blogs in history mentioned this very subject. Twenty-two years ago.
Here's the famed James Taranto quoting other people in his daily column. James is a stickler for following the rules.
"But there's something disappointing in giving your sparring partner exactly what they [sic] want."
"Of course what Ferraro said is that "nobody is going to say they [sic] don't ..."
"Where a person lives, their [sic] immigration status or who they [sic] love should not ..."
"... if a black person killed a white person they [sic] were more likely ..."
"If a 5-year-old can't sit still, it is unlikely that they [sic] can do well in a kindergarten class ..."
What this is really saying is, Broken is okay. I'm sure James and associated sticklers would like to fix every other broken thing on the planet, but for some reason they happily exclude this one obvious blow-it from their agenda. The question for James is, Are you planning on doing this for the rest of time eternal?
Here's the bottom line:
They does not necessarily equal plural. And I can semi-prove it.
My very first week in the South, I was alone in a diner. The waitress walked up and asked, "How y'all doin' today?" The exact same thing happened at a different diner a few days later.
That's when I realized that y'all doesn't necessarily equal 'plural', and 'they', in this context, is no different. To refine it even further, you could say that 'he or she' is the they, because more than one person is involved.
Coyote got it exactly right. Unlike any other language on the planet, English was built; constructed; formed from a collage of many languages, even varying forms of English, itself, and is thus designed to change with the times as the building process continues. While a total bitch for the outsider to learn, we who are fluent in it are offered an immense, descriptive vocabulary that no other language comes close to. In many, if not most languages, the exact meaning of a spoken word is based upon inflection. In English, we have a whole different word for every single variation, and then we still have inflection for the nuance.
Put another way, using 'they' for a singular person might feel a little awkward, but [sic]'ing every use of it for the rest of time eternal sounds a lot more awkward.
