[BrandoElFollito]

Completely unrelated, but as a non native speaker of English I was completely lost in the "their"s, not knowing who they refer to.

Then I realized that JT may prefer to be addressed this way, which is indeed the case according to their Twitter handle.

It is a shame that better pronouns were not promoted in English to simplify the understanding of sentences where they both refer to a single person and a group.

[rsynnott]

English is extremely stingy with pronouns in general; beyond singular vs plural they, there's also no proper plural you, no modern informal you (it was 'thou', but that's archaic), no exclusive vs inclusive we, and so on.

[BrandoElFollito]

> no exclusive vs inclusive we

Thank you for teaching me something - I did not know that this existed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clusivity)

[mijoharas]

> there's also no proper plural you

I don't know what y'all are talking about.

[knorker]

All y'all use y'all?

[jmartrican]

I love y'all, both the word and y'all. Wish it was more widely used outside of the US South.

[fsckboy]

in my dialect of English we just say "you all" or "all of you"

[superdeeda]

> I don't know what y'all are talking about.

"You" can refer to either one person or multiple people.

[mijoharas]

And y'all only refers to multiple people. I guess it's kinda a plural "you". ;)

[umanwizard]

“You guys” is the plural form of “you” for the majority of American English-speakers in colloquial contexts.

[rsynnott]

Or "y'all", or "youse", or lots of other variants. But there's no standard, is the thing.

[fwlr]

I noticed this when I was writing it and tried to use names rather than pronouns as much as possible. I actually use “their” all the time for everyone, I wasn’t aware that JT requests it in their Twitter profile. About fifteen years ago, when I first heard about gender-neutral pronouns, the objection at the time was “it’s harder to write and more confusing”. I started doing it as a challenge to see if it really was hard or not. In that fifteen years, you are in fact the first person to have ever noticed and said something (congratulations).

[BrandoElFollito]

> In that fifteen years, you are in fact the first person to have ever noticed and said something (congratulations).

This may be because I am French and we do not "reuse" pronouns (in the sense that "their" always refers to a group). I know however that "their" use in single form has a long history in English and I therefore try to use "their" like you most of the time when it helps to generalize.

We have new constructs in French such as iel (il + elle = he + she) which is used by some and by others not (and forbidden (or very strongly discouraged, I do not remember) in national education). I do not know if this is good or bad, it has the advantage to address males and females as a group (it is otherwise "he" or "hes" (plural of "he")).