 Question. What's wrong with the following sentence? If a writer cares about grammar, they'll use pronouns carefully. Answer. Nothing. Traditionally, it was seen as an error to use a plural pronoun, they, to refer to a singular antecedent, a writer. How many writers? One. How many does they mean? Usually more than one. It doesn't match. The traditional way to fix the error was to replace they with a singular pronoun. If a writer cares about grammar, he'll use pronouns carefully. How many writers? One. How many does he mean? One. That's a match. Error corrected, right? Here's the problem. Traditionally, when the gender was unknown or unimportant, like it is in our example, the masculine he was used to mean anyone. It was that same logic that produced words like business man, mankind, and all our other gendered language. Well, the second wave feminists of the 1950s and 60s objected to this, and our whole language changed. We started saying business person and humankind. Easy enough, except when it came to the issue of pronouns. It became standard to write he or she, a convention that lasted decades into the 2010s or so. If a writer cares about grammar, he or she will use pronouns carefully. But people were dissatisfied with the solution. The phrase he or she is a mouthful. It doesn't come naturally, and it still places one gender ahead of the other. Some writers and publications used variations, such as she or he, or alternating he and she, each time the situation came up. But those solutions aren't much better, especially when we consider that some people don't identify as either male or female, and so they're still left out of those constructions, making them inaccurate. We don't mean only men or only women. We mean anyone, any writer. The basic problem here is that English has no gender-neutral singular pronoun for these situations. People have tried introducing some, such as she or he, but they haven't caught on. As we explained in our introductory video, that's the difference between prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar. Descriptive grammar describes the language we already use, rather than prescribing the way we should use language. And that's exactly where our current solution comes from. The pronoun most of us use for this kind of situation in everyday speech is they, which is why the example at the beginning of this video might have sounded natural to you. That's the way you would actually say it. And so more and more, people accept the stogiest linguists have given in and agreed that this is a common, standard, correct usage, not an error. We call it the singular they. That just means the word they can be used now as a singular pronoun, rather than being saved exclusively for plurals as it always was before. In fact, the American Dialect Society, a body of more than 200 linguists, named the singular they as word of the year in 2016. In 2019, the Merriam-Webster dictionary followed suit, naming they as its own word of the year to recognize this change in its usage. And it's not the first time our language has changed this way. According to historians at the Oxford English Dictionary, the pronoun you has undergone the exact same transformation. For a long time, it was used as a plural. The correct singular pronoun was considered to be thou until about the 17th century. And like today, the transition produced controversy. In 1660, the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, wrote a whole book about the foolishness of using you as a singular. Robert Loth and Lindley Murray, grammarians from the 1700s, made their students take tests that emphasized thou as a singular and you as a plural, only and always. If that seems silly to you now, it's just a testament to the way that language can evolve over time and a strong indication that the singular they is the language of the future. End of the present, too.