Language is ever-changing. there’s a reason why you don’t hear Shakespearean English while walking down the street. I’m not using “doth” or “thou” in my writing, and that’s because, over the years, words like these have fallen out of use. Language evolves as culture does. Regardless, controversy over new grammatical conventions is ongoing, especially now as technology necessitates the use of new slang and chatspeak. However, one linguistic controversy has existed for years under the radar.  Indeed, even after making this common grammatical error, a person would have a hard time believing they had said anything wrong.

Some sharp-eyed grammar experts out there may have had a problem with that last sentence. For those not in the know, using the word “they” as a singular pronoun is considered incorrect by most standards. In fact, the HiLite style manual itself prohibits using it in this way.  However, for many reasons, using “they” as a singular pronoun is gaining acceptance; it was elected 2015’s Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, for example, and is being included in the style guides of prominent newspapers like The Washington Post. The argument over “they” provides clarity for a larger point—that language evolves and that we should accept this as positive and inevitable.

The conventionally correct way to word a sentence is “a person would have a hard time believing he had said anything wrong.” Yet, the use of “he” as a gender-neutral pronoun is a rather controversial choice in its assumption that the default gender is the male one, a view unfavored by a society progressing toward equality of genders. While “he” is traditionally the gender-neutral singular pronoun, using it makes it seem as though the person in this sentence is automatically male, despite that fact being unknown. “He or she” would also be correct, but that’s clunky. “They” is not only accurate for the situation, but also smooth and easily understood.

Acceptance of the singular “they” is not new. In Emma, Jane Austen wrote “Every body is in love once in their lives,” and in “Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare wrote “No man goes to battle to be killed / But they do get killed.” The singular “they” is already commonly used in speech and in text. It also fills a gap in the English language, as we currently have no gender-neutral pronoun. While we could follow the lead of the Chinese and Finnish languages by creating a new pronoun for this use, “they” has already come to fill this gap. It has also become a common pronoun for individuals who don’t identify with either gender. Because “they” has already been in use as a singular pronoun for many years, it’s an easy choice for expressing gender neutrality.

The acceptance of “they” reflects an ongoing process of linguistic evolution. Words and grammatical rules fall into and out of fashion all the time, yet it seems every single one is actively resisted in one way or another by older generations. What we should take from the lesson of the singular “they” is that language tends to favor evolution. “Thou” is no longer the singular form of “you,” saying “nice” no longer means “silly” or “foolish” as it did 500 years ago, and now we should let “they” refer to one person. As times change, our language has evolved as necessary. The English language has always lacked a truly neutral pronoun, and “they” has become that pronoun. The very purpose of language and grammatical conventions is to make communication concise and easy for all to understand, so if we accept new trends in language, we become more inclusive of all. Even if a person was particularly finicky about using language a certain way, they couldn’t argue with the merits of that, could they?

The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the HiLite staff. Reach Gillian Paxton at [email protected].