"They"

This is a post I've had on my website, and I'm posting it here because the other day at work we got into it again...

"They" as the non-specific, genderless, English pronoun has a long and honorable history in English literary usage. Yes. Really. It does. Jane Austen used it all the time (even when it was pretty certainly a man she meant, as in the first example):

• Who is in love with her? Who makes you their confidant?
  
• ...but it is not every body who will bestow praise where they may.
  
• [Mr. Woodhouse] was happily placed, quite at his ease, ready to talk with pleasure of what had been achieved, and advise every body to come and sit down, and not to heat themselves.
  
• there is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry.
  
• I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly.
  
• It would be a pity that anyone who so well knew how to teach, should not have their powers in exercise again.
  

And here are some examples from other writers:

• and every one to rest themselves betake
  -- Shakespeare
  
  
• it is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy
  -- W. H. Auden
  
  
• 'tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o'erhear the speech
  -- Shakespeare
  
  
• a person can't help their birth
  -- W. M. Thackeray
  
  
• no man goes to battle to be killed. -- But they do get killed
  -- G. B. Shaw
  

The Oxford English Dictionary and Webster's Unabridged enter as definition no. 2 of 'they':

"Often used in reference to a singular noun made universal by every, any, no, etc., or applicable to one of either sex (=`he or she')."

So the authoritative dictionaries already recognize that in 'they', English has BOTH (1) a plural pronoun and (2) a specific-reference-free singular pronoun. 'Specific reference free' means that we use it, and have used it for centuries, to indicate that the person it refers to is no particular person we have in mind. (That, of course, makes it the perfect gender-neutral pronoun as well.) (And don't argue that one pronoun can't do double duty: 'you' does. Heck, 'you' doesn't even decline: it's singular, plural, subject, object, all in one.) Here are the examples the OED lists:

• Yf a psalme scape ony persone, or a lesson, or else yt they omyt one verse or twayne.
  -- 1526 Pilg. Perf.
  
  
• He neuer forsaketh any creature vnlesse they before haue forsaken them selues.
  -- 1535 Fisher Ways perf. Relig. ix. Wks. (1876)
  
  
• Every Body fell a laughing, as how could they help it.
  -- 1749 Fielding Tom Jones
  
  
• If a person is born of a gloomy temper they cannot help it.
  -- 1759 Chesterf. Lett.
  
  
• Nobody can deprive us of the Church, if they would.
  -- 1835 Whewell in Life (1881)
  
  
• Nobody fancies for a moment that they are reading about anything beyond the pale of ordinary propriety.
  -- 1858 Bagehot Lit. Stud. (1879)
  
  
• Now, nobody does anything well that they cannot help doing.
  -- 1866 Ruskin Crown Wild Olives Sect.38 (1873)
  

I'm going to quote Geoffrey Pullum (Professor of Linguistics at UCSB and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language) from one of his Language Log postings on the subject for what I hope (but have too much sense to think) will be the final word:

By all means, avoid using they with singular antecedents in your own writing and speaking if you feel you cannot bear it. Language Log is not here to tell you how to write or speak. But don't try to tell us that it's grammatically incorrect. Because when a construction is clearly present several times in Shakespeare's rightly admired plays and poems, and occurs in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries, and is systematically present in the unreflecting conversational usage of just about everyone including Sean Lennon, then the claim that it is ungrammatical begins to look utterly unsustainable to us here at Language Log Plaza. This use of theyisn't ungrammatical, it isn't a mistake, it's a feature of ordinary English syntax that for some reason attracts the ire of particularly puristic pusillanimous pontificators, and we don't buy what they're selling.