A little video for The Baltimore Sun's Facebook page in which I talk about the inevitable acceptance of singular they has garnered, to my astonishment, more than 100,000 hits. Even more astonishing, the responses to it have been overwhelmingly positive.
The negative responses follow familiar patterns.
The people who refuse to engage with the evidence do not argue, but merely assert that anyone who does not share their sense of what is correct in English are "ignorant," "lazy," or "sloppy."*
Another reaction is to chime in with complaints about violations of other shibboleths, as if abandonment of one usage superstition would bring them all crashing down and plunge Western civilization back into barbarism. For example, in a fine article by Anne Curzan at Lingua Franca on the growing acceptance of singular they, commenters leap to the issue of Latin plurals. "Alas, our Latin heritage increasingly goes by the wayside," writes one, bemoaning that data can be both singular and plural in English.
To that, Benjamin Lukoff asked how many devotees of our Latin heritage use these plurals: "gymnasia," "arenae," "appendices" (exclusively), "formulae" (exclusively), "cruces," "hiatus," "ignoramus," "octopus."
The last three of that series, he points out, "have the same form in nominative singular and plural, because they're fourth declension, not second," which suggests that (a) some devotees of "our Latin heritage" may not have all that much Latin** and (b) that Latin in its own quaint way can be as irregular and illogical as English.
Another commenter on that thread pointed out the fundamental truth of usage succinctly summed up by William Safire: "When enough of us are wrong, we're right."
And another fundamental truth about usage can be gleaned from Max Planck's "Scientific Autobiography": "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because the opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Thus William Cullen Bryant's inclusion of bogus on his Index Expurgatorius, Ambrose Bierce's scorn for quit as a synonym of stop, Nero Wolfe's condemnation of contact as a verb in Rex Stout's murder mysteries, and E.B. White's preservation of the hopefully superstition in a later edition of Strunk and White are all either extinct or terminal.
God grant me the remaining years to see the Associated Press Stylebook grudgingly accept reality.
*If you think that my acceptance of singular they makes me ignorant, lazy, or sloppy, say so directly and I will demand satisfaction. My second will wait on your second.
**I myself only had two years in high school and was, like Vercingetorix, defeated by Julius Caesar. (And if you mean to quibble over the placement of only in the previous sentence, you can pound sand.)