In my idiolect, changing the gender of pronouns inside of idioms is highly marked, even though I use singular "they" as the epicene pronoun. > The classic phra

In my idiolect, changing the gender of pronouns inside of idioms is highly marked, even though I use singular "they" as the epicene pronoun. > The classic phrase was ... strangely gendered I don't think it was "strangely" gendered; despite recent growth in the corpus frequency of singular "they", many formal manuals of style still prohibit its usage, preferring "one" as the epicene pronoun. Singular "they" has existed for about as long as Modern English, but generic "he" was significantly more common throughout the 20th century. Given how long idioms take to change, generally speaking, I think it should be unsurprising that this usage of generic "he" remains common. The classic paper on this is "Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar", from 1974, which presents the argument that singular "they" was more common before the prescriptive grammar movement in English, which greater increased how common generic "he" was[0]. [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-in-society/article/abs/androcentrism-in-prescriptive-grammar-singular-they-sexindefinite-he-and-he-or-she1/5F82DDFEC41B3D2BC5E55C29B74310D1 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-in-society/...