this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Actually it's older than people think. Shakespeare used it for stuff like "Every knight grabbed their sword" and even for talking about a specific person it's not a new phenomenon to use singular they if the gender doesn't matter (so I was told in a linguistics sub over on r*ddit when I insisted it was new)
The only new thing is that people say, it's their prefered pronoun.
I inserted a comma to make my meaning more clear, I hope. I'm not a native speaker so sorry if it was ambiguous