I feel like the word, "they" has been abused. The new definition originates from controlling, angry people who got their own way with fiddling with the English language and I don't like it.
I don't have any particularly strong feelings about it.
If I am uncertain of someone's gender I use "they" as an all-purpose pronoun. Because I've heard that that is the polite thing to do. English isn't a dead language and words can and do change in how they are used and in what they mean.
I think you'll probably have strong feelings about it if you're standing next to the intended target when the commanding officer shouts "Shoot them". Like I said before, I don't mind "them"being requisitioned as singular in all contexts, even where ambiguous, just so long as somebody invents a new, unambiguously plural set of pronouns,
and they have enough clout to persuade us all to completely and immediately drop the traditional usage of /they/them/their in favour of the new words.
Because every now and then, clarity really matters.
Ofc, it would be a lot simpler and less confusing to invent gender-neutral verisions of he/she, or else rewind to archaic pronouns that do the same job, or else borrow some appropriate foreign pronouns Why not?
Yeah, yeah, language certainly changes ; and usage of "they"" has been changing, slowly, in the prescribed direction for hundreds of years thus far; and there's a reason why it was changing so slowly, and got stuck half way (before the PC brigade turned up the screws on it) Because people kept stumbling on situations where you need an unambiguous singular, and "they" just wasn't up to the job. You cant fix that problem with platitudes. It needs considerably more thought than your average do-gooder is willing to to put into it.
Language changes naturally and organically, as a rule, If we
must force the pace,and consciously decide its direction, then we need to take a careful, ecological perspective on it, or else we just poison it and create new problems; just the same as we poison the Natural World with our industry. And, frankly, it gets on my tits when people try to make a virtue of that.
