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If you’ve been arguing that the gender-neutral pronoun “they” doesn’t make any sense because it’s not grammatically correct, a crowd of over 200 linguists who met at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting last Friday evening have some bad news for you. “They” was chosen as the most significant term or word in the past year in a landslide vote.
(RELATED: 5 Arguments Against Gender Neutral Pronouns that Don’t Make Any Sense)
Using a singular they is common habit in American speech, as in “That dog loves their owner,” but has risen to prominence again as a useful way to refer to people who don’t use the pronouns “he” or “she.“ The conference was live tweeted, and they was named the winning word at 3:35 PM.
Ben Zimmer, a language columnist for the Wall Street Journal who presided over the voting on Friday afternoon, said in a press release:
“In the past year, new expressions of gender identity have generated a deal of discussion, and singular they has become a particularly significant element of that conversation,” Zimmer said. “While many novel gender-neutral pronouns have been proposed, they has the advantage of already being part of the language. Other contenders for the 2015 title of Word of the Year were “on fleek,” “ammosexual,” “ghost,” and “thanks Obama.”
