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.
See my other comments in this thread, but Shakespeare did not use singular they to refer to a specific, known person. That is a new invention.
I inserted a comma to make my meaning more clear, I hope. I'm not a native speaker so sorry if it was ambiguous