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A comment on Scrabble rule change allows use of 'OK'. Parent comment

Re:Scrabble rule change allows use of 'OK' by stordoff on Thursday May 02, 2019 @06:55PM (#19813740)
> It sounds odder when it is deliberately used to avoid (mis)gendering a specific individual: "Pat does not discuss their* gender."

I suspect it depends on dialect. "their" just sounds more informal to me, "his"/"her" sounds slightly more formal.

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Re:Scrabble rule change allows use of 'OK' by mattkrause on Thursday May 02, 2019 @08:48PM (#19814473)
Hmmm, interesting idea.

I looked at some older examples of singular-they and they almost exclusively refer to an unknown or unspecified person ("Everyone loves their mother"). Using it for a specified person seems to be fairly new: Time Magazine had a piece describing how their (in this sense) was the 2015 word of the year.

http://time.com/4173992/word-of-the-year-2015-they/

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