Oxford English Dictionary on…they

A Brief History of Singular They…

Singular they has become the pronoun of choice to replace he and she in cases where the gender of the antecedent – the word the pronoun refers to – is unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary, or where gender needs to be concealed. It’s the word we use for sentences like Everyone loves his mother.

But that’s nothing new. The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular theyback to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf. …

Read further here: https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

Written by Dennis Baron, Professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On Dennis’s blog, The Web of Language his blog post ‘War on Pronouns’ echoes some of the themes above, commenting on the ‘David’ statue trigger warning issue in Tallahassee Florida…

In March, the Tallahassee Classical School declared war on pronouns. The chair of the school’s governing board, Barney Bishop, told an interviewer, “We don’t use pronouns.” 

That got buried under the larger story, the ouster of Tallahassee Classical’s principal for failing to provide parents with a trigger warning before an eighth grade class viewed a picture of Michelangelo’s iconic statue of David. But it turns out that some people think pronouns are more dangerous than nudity.

A simple definition of a pronoun?

A pronoun is a word that stands in for a noun, often to avoid the need to repeat the same noun over and over. Like nouns, pronouns can refer to people, things, concepts, and places. Most sentences contain at least one noun or pronoun.

OR, as the Australian Style Manual states:

Pronouns replace other words. People will find content easier to read when pronouns match their context.