Using 'they' in place of 'he/she'

I can’t resist this addemdum to the topic. There’s a great podcast episode by Lexicon Valley going into the history of this issue: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2016/01/american_dialect_society_word_of_the_year_is_the_singular_they.html

In it, they note that the use of they as singular goes back to the thirteenth century. It was used by Chaucer, Shakespeare and Austen. It was only grammarians in the 1800s who decided, by themselves, that it should no longer be allowed.

Seems silly to suggest that a pronoun can’t be used for plural and singular, given that we use “you” for both the singular and plural.

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