James Finn
2 min readJul 11, 2024

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Awesome! It might help to understand that/they them has been used in a singular, non-specific sense since it was first introduced into Old English in the Danelaw, long before the Norman conquest.

Referring to an unknown person as they/them is a natural, organic part of spoken English, and it has been since English was called English.

But sometimes, prescriptive grammarians try to erase and destroy that truth. It all started a relatively short time ago (less than two centuries) in the history of modern English. A few elite academics decided that Latin grammar was the most perfect and ideal system of grammar on the planet. (Why? Who knows. Obviously, that's just a silly, arbitrary thought. And those academics were silly, arbitrary fools.)

They decided that English must become more like Latin and less like English.

They invented silly rules like no prepositions at the ends of clauses or sentences, like not splitting infinitives. This despite that both of those are native English language features.

The same elitist academics also tried to extinguish the ordinary usage of they/them in the singular, non-specific sense — which Shakespeare and Chaucer had both used unapologetically and without complaint.

Now, when we refer to a known person (rather than an unknown or unspecified person) as they/them, that is something of a minor innovation.

But it can't be called ungrammatical simply because of the number problem. Except by those elitist academics who are long dead anyway. And except for increasingly disfavored prescriptivist grammarians, who are also elitist academics.

So we should all be proud and pleased to use they/them in the singular sense, not just because we are rightfully fighting elitism, but because it's an important, natural, and ancient part of our language.

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James Finn
James Finn

Written by James Finn

James Finn is an LGBTQ columnist, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Act Up NY, and an agented but unpublished novelist.

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