Re: Epicene pronoun in english?

BP:
> At 02:01 5.3.2004, Remi Villatel wrote:
>
> >"They" is/are too... plural.  ;-)
> >
> >But I don't worry much about it; I will find my "ideal" epicene
> >pronoun.  ;-)
>
> One thing speaking in favor of _they_ is that it is
> already grammatical! :)  I've used it a long time and
> only rarely encounterd conflict with plurality.
> In practice I think I use a judicious mix of
> _they, one, you_.
You're quite right: just like _you_, _we_ and _us_,
_they/them_ can in British English refer to a single person
(as evidenced by "yourself", "ourself" (Google: 129000),
"themself" (134000)). I don't know whether all the epicene
pronoun fuss is due simply to prescriptivism or whether there
is genuinely a dialect difference with AmE here, such that AmE
lacks the BrE solution. (It's hard to tell, what with AmE
being so much more prescriptivist in the first place.)

That said, single-referent _they/them_ is normally used only
when the sex of the referent is unknown or deliberately
concealed by the speaker. I could not, for instance, say
"I was talking to BP the other day, and they [=BP] told
me...". So the default rule for BrE is that the sex of
the human referent must be specified if known, which is
still not an ideal state of affairs.

--And.

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