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by stordoff
2612 days ago
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> It sounds odder when it is deliberately used to avoid (mis)gendering a specific individual: "Pat does not discuss their* gender." I suspect it depends on dialect. "their" just sounds more informal to me, "his"/"her" sounds slightly more formal. |
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I looked at some older examples of singular-they and they almost exclusively refer to an unknown or unspecified person ("Everyone loves their mother"). Using it for a specified person seems to be fairly new: Time Magazine had a piece describing how their (in this sense) was the 2015 word of the year.
http://time.com/4173992/word-of-the-year-2015-they/