Battles of grammar, for the most part, play out in English classrooms and in the pages of style guides. Rarely do arguments over split infinitives and Oxford commas venture beyond the walls of academia. But one linguistic phenomenon lands in the limelight every so often, and it’s a word you know well: the pronoun “they” — along with its derivatives “them” and “their.”
It lies at the heart of a struggle over both grammar and human identity, specifically when it's applied to an individual rather than a group. For example: Alex was so hungry they cleaned their plate in a minute flat. In its singular form, this nondescript pronoun can refer to a person without specifying their (case in point) gender. As such, it wields great power in both the feminist and non-binary movements. What’s more, research suggests it’s a prime example of language in flux, marked by an observable shift in the grammatical paradigm as people adjust their understanding of the pronoun’s versatility. In 2015, the American Dialect Society even named it word of the year.
Many critics remain uneasy with singular “they,” and plenty of prescriptivists — those who uphold traditional and formalized language rules, rather than how people actually use language currently — condemn it as ungrammatical or ambiguous. But that hasn’t stopped its ascent.
