Of course you can! This "rule," utterly contrary to how English actually works, has never been anything but an elitist social construction. Native English speakers have been splitting infinitives and ending clauses with prepositions since English was a thing. They're built into the language.

Rules to the contrary were invented by grammarians enamored with Latin and Greek, who bizarrely believed Latin was something like a "perfect language" that English speakers should emulate.

But of course, English isn't Latin, Latin hardly contains any prepositions anyway, and you CAN'T split infinitives in Latin because infinitives are one word. So "rules" that make sense in Latin are just silly in English. (I wonder what such grammarians would have done if their prestige language had been highly agglutinative, meaning shoving morphemes together to form words that behave more like sentences, as in Finish, Japanese, or Indonesian.)

But the invented rules by grammarian elites have not had silly consequences. They've tended to artificially and arbitrarily enforce class distinctions, as perfectly ordinary and natural English is derided as "uneducated" or "low class."

Today, thankfully, such ideas mostly have died out as we come to recognize how silly they are. (By the way, the parenthical "thankfully"and "hopefully" etc are also perfectly natural English that prescriptivist grammarians sometimes snob out on.)

But another perfectly natural and ancient English speaking pattern, the use of they/them in the singular indefinite sense, is facing quite a pushback from grammarians who seem much more interested in hating on trans people than understanding how language works or respecting English as the vast majority of English speakers actually speak it.

I had an amusing exchange just a couple weeks ago on Quora with an oh so prim and proper woman from the suburbs of London who went so far as to suggest that if Shakespeare and Chaucer had used "they" in the singular sense then Shakespeare and Chaucer were wrong, and that we shouldn't be afraid to face up to that fact. 😂

She actually suggested that we should be teaching children not to emulate Shakespeare and Chaucer, but to follow good grammar rules instead. (Forsooth! Let's make sure kids don't say that! Imagine the chaos if children started emulating Shakespeare!)

Sigh. Of course, what was really motivating her was transphobia. She was all but red-faced and apoplectic about the supposed danger trans and non-binary folks present to what she called "normal children."

So she wants "grammar" enforced. Such an old, tired, silly refrain from people who don't have an actual thought in their heads.

But I have to thank you for this article!

This is totally new to me!

I had no idea that proposed gender-neutral pronouns had been suggested and even recorded in dictionaries so long ago. "Thon" would have been such a useful addition to English if it had caught on.

Fascinating that somebody saw the need and even made some headway in the 19th century. I had no idea!

Thank you for such an interesting bit of language history!