All the while singular
they has been lurking in the background. And now it's moving to the fore. A driving force has been the LGBTQ community, which has embraced singular
they not only to include both men and women but also to refer to
non-binary people who identify as neither. That has
added social conservatives to the word's detractors, but has also given it steam. The new binary-busting usage made it the American Dialect Society's "Word of the Year"
in 2015 and then Merriam-Webster's
in 2019.
It also helped inspire linguistic authorities to put down their red pens. In 2015, the Washington
Post copy desk
announced that the paper would start allowing singular
they. In 2017, the AP Stylebook
approved it "when alternative wording is overly awkward or clumsy." The same year, the Chicago Manual of Style said that if an individual prefers to be referred to as
they, then
they is the preferred style. And each evolution has added to the sense that this usage isn't just convenient, it's also grammatically okay.
Bryan Garner, author of the famed usage guide
Garner's Modern English Usage, describes the word's viral adoption in recent years as being, at least in part, the result of social pressure: In this case, the demands about what "ought" to be acceptable are coming from progressives rather than school teachers. Though he predicted in the '90s that singular
they would prevail, he says he is surprised that LGBTQ rights proved the tipping point. "It used to be that the
he-or-she folks were progressive," he writes to TIME, "now their 'binary' usage is considered distinctly unwoke."