When I was in grad school in the 1980s, the American Psychological Association moved to adopt this change to eliminate sexist language from professional writing. Took journalists quite a while to “get” why this is important.
Sorry, grammar nerds. The singular ‘they’ has been declared Word of the Year.
by Jeff Guo January 8
“Singular "they,” the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening.
Singular they, which The Post officially adopted in its Style guide in 2015, is already a common habit in American speech. An example: “Everyone wants their cat to succeed.”
Earlier, the so-called proper way to say it would have been, “Everyone wants his or her cat to succeed.”
(via Sorry, grammar nerds. The singular ‘they’ has been declared Word of the Year. – The Washington Post)
Barbara K Iverson 