I think the real issue lies with the battle of whose gender should appear first. He or she, she or he?! As a female, I'd much rather be the first to be mentioned. As the saying goes, "Ladies first."

But, for those people who wanna be politically correct and not offend anyone, I think that 'they' is your safest choice in pronouns in today's world.

The singular pronoun "he" can be used when adressing both genders.

I don't mind it so much on Facebook where one expects people to use texting slang, but in civilized communications I prefer to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

yes , "they" is here with us to stay. as texting, like short hand. the message is short and quick. the lest amount of letters use the better.
Texting - some of that is sometime hard to understand. but of that's but of the fun.
communicating - it's always interesting to find news ways. I for one am trying to learn hand sign communication.

The use of "he or she" to match a singular antecedent such as "someone" sounds awkward because almost everyone uses "they" in spoken English. It is important for students to know what is correct, however, as often makes up English language usage questions on standardized tests.

A more irritating error, however, which is ubiquitous even in high end print advertisements is the erroneous use of the contraction IT'S for the possessive pronoun ITS. Rarely do people think that HIS, HERS OURS, THEIRS or MINE needs an apostrophe. I think ITS v. IT'S needs to be a spell check item on computers!

I think the usage is tied to political correctness and the culture of text messaging. Who on earth wants to use three words when you can get your message across with one? Especially when you get charged by the size of your message on a mobile device.

Usage of "they" always seemed better to me. Pardon me, may I ask another question of you since you seem to be a linguist? Where could I find someone to translate a phonetically rendered transcript of a speech given in Ojibwe? I don't expect that the miscellaneous category of National Geographic emails to which this question got submitted (regarding a website article with Algonquin in the title)will be answered.

...or is it another example of the dumbing down of the language--otherwise known as "adaptation".

hey Leslie!

I had a healthy regard for the English language before the Research Department at NGS, since then I've become the crotchety old editor herding engineers down the path of grammatical correctness--without much success I must admit. Thank heaven there are folks like you around.

Best wishes,

Kathy Marcus

As a facebook developer, I can tell you the reason "they" is so pervasive is simply down to data sharing permissions.

Many facebook user's accounts don't allow applications to access personal information such as gender. For those apps to work properly, they must use 'they'. This is actually provided for in the facebook API.

I know that's not entirely the point of this article, but I thought I would mention it!

I recommend borrowing from another tongue in the case of replacing "he or she" with the plural "they". Instead of using "they", let's use "ta" from Mandarin; although there are gender-specific characters for "she" (她) and "he" (他), each pronoun is pronounced the same, which may be (at least part of) why Chinese-speakers tend to mix up "she" and "he", often using one for the other in both spoken and written forms as learners of English, or maybe not, ha ha. Ta ta.