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> Singular they is nothing new at all. As if I claimed it was?

• emodendroket 5y ago
  That is the implication of calling it a trend.
  • pezezin 5y ago
    Let me clarify what I wanted to say with "recent trend": Singular they to refer to a hypothetical or unspecified person is very normal, any fluent speaker of English, native or not, uses it frequently. But singular they to refer to an specific person is not so common. I have never anybody who speaks like that, and I have met many people in my life. Maybe it has been used for decades in some dialects, but I only started to notice it this year, with all the push for non-gendered, non-binary language and the like. In my book, that's a trend.
    • emodendroket 5y ago
      For usages like "Robert likes to clean their house" I could see this, but in an example like this with "my friend" I don't find it to be particularly modish.
  • dataflow 5y ago
    No. Not only does "trend" not imply "new" (X rising from 10 at t = 0 to 11, 12, 13, 14, ... year-by-year is obviously a trend and clearly doesn't imply X was ever 0??) but I in fact quite explicitly said that the recent trend is "people pushing for everyone to use it more". Notice I did not say "anew", I did not say "for the first time", I said more. You're putting words in my mouth by reading it as "new". In fact the entire point of the comment was to point out that it is not new but that there has been a trend of it becoming more prevalent.