… If applied to everyone, “they” would complete the leveling-up progress of equal dignity that “you” started centuries ago.
(Teresa M. Bejan, “What Quakers Can Teach Us About the Politics of Pronouns,” NYTimes, 11-16-19)
1. A person has to register early if he wants to vote.
2. A person has to register early if he or she wants to vote.
3. A person has to register early if they want to vote.
As a half-woke pedant I’ve stuck with version 2 until now, but version 3 is winning.
The history provided by Professor Bejan helps me. She notes that English nobles could call themselves “we.” (The Queen still does.) At that time “thou” was the proper singular, so commoners were required to address a noble as plural “you,” since he (or she) considered himself (or herself) to be more than one. (The Duke of York still does, though he “let the side down.”)
The Quakers leveled down by “thou-ing” everyone, including blue-bloods, but English eventually went the other way and leveled up. I got to be you, and you got to be you, like our blood was blue, too.
The fact that plural “you” crossed over to singular furnishes a respectable precedent for the migration of “they” to neutered singularity. It relieves one of the cross of pedantry they have borne. They’re chiefest concern now — our chiefest concern, or mine if I’m humble — is to get comfortable with the contracting of future “they-all” into “th-all,” where it will team up with “y’all” as a disambiguator for them, whoever it is.
(c) 2019 JMN
EthicalDative 
Accents
Fiona Hill leaving a closed hearing on Capitol Hill early this month. Credit…T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times.
Roger Cohen writes opinion for the NYTimes, is a naturalized American citizen raised in Britain, and in his own words “a Jew, the son of South African immigrants.”
Cohen writes about another naturalized American, Fiona Hill, who emigrated from County Durham in northern England. Her father was a coal miner from age 14.
Fiona Hill’s mention of how her accent would have held her back in England triggered memory of a remark by Dr. Katherine Kennedy Carmichael (1912 – 1982), the first dean of women at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.
In her distinguished drawl she quipped with twinkling eyes to a gaggle of language students, “All my life people have listened less to what I say and more to how I say it.”
(c) 2019 JMN