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I don't find that awkward.

• qbrass 10y ago
  "Brian thanked Jamie for updating their status."
  • marak830 10y ago
    Exactly. I don't understand the hesitation for using they or their. We will never be able to remember all the different pronouns people want to be called (without some sort of system to look it up constantly at least), I believe it's perfectly acceptable.
    • Mikhail_Edoshin 10y ago
      But it's unclear whose status has been updated.
      • vertex-four 10y ago
        "Brian thanked Jamie for updating his status" is also unclear and needs context. Did Jamie update Brian's status? That's the first thing I parsed from it. If that sentence appeared as a machine-generated message on a social feed, I'd expect to see the actual status duplicated underneath. Thing is... there's already plenty of people going primarily by singular "they" for a pronoun, and it generally works pretty well.
        • marak830 10y ago
          I agree with vertex, even with the male pronoun, it could still be confused( like a lot of things in English, you have to make an educated guess as to the meaning). I hear that a lot from students.