Thanks. Curse this language. I just want to refer to people! It’s simple encapsulation and abstraction. I shouldn’t have to care about implementation details irrelevant to the context.
[name of paper] mentions that X is faster than Y. The author suggests the cause of the speed up is Z, while we believe it is W.
(The OED quotations for sense 2(b) "In anaphoric reference to a singular noun or pronoun of undetermined gender" go back to at least 1200AD.)
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend> According to the third edition, The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (edited by Burchfield and published in 1996) singular they has not only been widely used by good writers for centuries, but is now generally accepted, except by some conservative grammarians, including the Fowler of 1926, who, it is argued, ignored the evidence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Elsewhere in the article you'll find dates like: 1375, 1382, 1400, 1489, 1759, etc, and references to these by Fowler's
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Modern_English...
Anyone arguing against singular 'they' may as well be arguing for a gender neutral 'he' - an argument lost over a century ago by virtually any modern English standard.
Absolutely true. At least one whole generation grew up taught in school that singular "they" isn't a thing. I was on the tail end of that and read a lot of books written by the previous generation, so it never stuck strongly in my head, but that's what GP is referring to.
Either way, clinging to a frozen-in-time interpretation of a living, changing language is foolish for anyone who would like to easily understand and be easily understood. And not waste time in our too-short lives on pointless language nitpickery like we're doing here.
But by modern English standards, which I would define through works like Fowlers', the legitimate argument against singular they is long over.
That seems like a flawed analogy; many people abuse the traditional generic usage of 'they' but I've seen few people abuse the traditional generic usage of 'he'.