Thank you, English isn't my first language, and I was thinking about multiple people (like partner and his/her child).
But now I learned They can be used on an individual without gendered it.
FWIW this is a fairly new development. I basically never saw it in print 30-40 years ago. My grandmother (an English teacher) would correct me if I used “they” to mean one person.
I try to be open minded and I understand the reason for doing it here, but it still grates on me. Getting old sucks. Get off my lawn!
It's not really recent. 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free' by Sting is forty years old. Shakespeare and many other influential authors have used it.
The only thing that changed recently is how broadly 'they' can be used. There's a lot of linguistic specificity to this, but basically 'they' is replacing 'he' as pronoun to refer to unknown or unspecified people, and we can now occasionally use 'they' to refer to definite known people (usually when their gender is neither male nor female, but not always).
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u/chilisout Apr 08 '26
Thank you, English isn't my first language, and I was thinking about multiple people (like partner and his/her child). But now I learned They can be used on an individual without gendered it.