Posted: Sep 15, 2019 6:54 am
kiore wrote:The singular 'they' has a very long history and is not a modern politically correct invention at all.
Good article on this from the OED:
https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-his ... ular-they/
Yeah I've read that, but that's not actually the same usage at all. That's using 'they' to refer to an unspecified singular person, not a specified one. It seems to me that people are using one historical usage to claim that a completely different usage isn't new. So that's why I'm interested to know if anyone has an example of it that goes back further than the fairly recent usage.