Daniel A. Welty wrote:
* "they" and "their" are plural, and should never be used in the singular.
Thank you for sharing your option here, but you are not a linguist and
you are simply wrong.
At least two people in this thread have already linked to Wikipedia's
article on singular-they, which has extensive discussion about its
validity, complete with references, as well as more accessible
discussions written by professional language experts like Michael
Quinion or Geoffrey Pullum. In case you missed them the first few times,
here they are again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-the2.htm
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005423.html
(corrected broken link given earlier)
http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192/is-it-correct-to-use-their-instead-of-his-or-her
As for your prescription for solving this problem:
is for the speaker to assume that the person of unknown gender is
the same gender as they are.
As *they* are?
Thank you for your accidental demonstration that the use of singular
they is a natural and unobjectionable part of English language.
--
Steven
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