I am a singular-theyist.

That is to say, I like to use the pronoun "they" and its derivatives to refer to a generic individual.

It is extremely easy to get away with this in regular speech, even formal speech. Most people barely notice it.

It can be a bit more difficult to get it professionally published... depending on the profession. In my day job, I can't get away with it, as we have prescriptivists-nonpareil on staff whose job it is to corral the writers. Dangit.

In my side job(s), I self-publish, so it's hunky dory by me. When I write articles gratis for professional newsletters, I tend to be able to get away with it (mainly because the editors are unpaid, too, and may not notice what I'm attempting to pull on them).

I think everyone can agree that the generic "he" is currently a non-starter (similarly, "she"). It's just jarring.

The excrescence known as "he/she" or "he or she" --- we shall not speak of it.

One has been known to try using "one", but it sounds extremely formal, and is not appropriate many times.

As for the various made up genderless singular pronouns.... just stop it. Stop trying to make crap like "zhe" happen. It's not going to happen. It doesn't even sound English, which is part of the problem. (I can see "e", "em", "eir" eventually working its way into the language, but only after it goes through the they/them/their phase).

We already have a solution, and if you listen to how people actually speak you will realize the solution is the singular "they".

For those who complain that "they" is plural by its very nature, and it's not logical to use it in the singular sense... I could point you to other languages with similar things, but I don't have to do that.

We've already had a pronoun that used to be exclusively plural, and now covers the singular case as well:

you

The singular form of "you" was "thou". Yes, in "Modern English" (i.e., post-Great Vowel Shift). Over time, "thou" got shoved out of the language, and we're left with only one 2nd person (standard) pronoun.

What do you mean use a "singular you"? Are you uneducated?! It's not even logical!

Yeah.

I recommend the prescriptivists to take the bug out their ass (okay, look, I know this goes back millennia....in the chapter on Augustus in Suetonius, it talks about his own prescriptivist/descriptivist tendencies -- odd amongst all the sexual rumor-mongering, Suetonius usually spends some paragraphs on each emperor's language use). I know the very nature of an irrelevant nitpicker is to see lice where none exist. Telling them to cut it out is pointless.

(See what I did there? =Snort=)

"They" as a singular pronoun is already widespread as a part of the spoken English language, and fixes the issue with regards to needing a genderless pronoun. It has been used as such for the entirety of the history of Modern English (to wit: Shakespeare used it -- huh, it goes back to Middle English, too).

So, it doesn't much matter if I support it or people get rapped on the knuckles for using it.

I just wonder if the same issue as crops up with "you" means that we'll be lamenting the lack of a distinctive plural third person pronoun in a hundred years to come.

"Th'all"?

Hmmm. Best get to work on that.