Tuesday, November 17, 2015

In Praise of "They"

While I am indifferent about The Oxford dictionary choosing an emoji as word of there year, I whole-hearted support the runner up: "they" as a gender neutral singular.  This use of "they" is common across most of the world and needs to also be adopted by US style guides.  It is functional, sleek, simplifies phrasing, and has a long lineage of being used to refer to an individual without specifying gender.

They: "Used to refer to a person of unspecified sex," according to Oxford Dictionaries.


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