this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Referring to a single teacher as "they" is not very intuitive though (although correct)...
I very much agree. Learning English as a foreign language, it feels very wrong to use plural for a single person. I'm still not quite used to it! Although, had I been taught that early on, I doubt it would feel any weirder than using "you are" for a single person.
And that's actually a pretty recent development. Less than a decade ago, I remember getting marked down in English class for using "they" as a genderless singular pronoun, as my elderly teacher grew up only ever using "they" to refer to a group.
Shakespear used they as a singular iirc
And Chaucer split infinitives, but I was always told it was "wrong" in gradeschool. That's the problem with pedantry: language is a fascinatingly complex and beautiful set of patterns. Boiling it down to rules is at best a handy style guide for formal writing, but at worst it gets weaponed as a way to discriminate against people who use lower prestige dialects.
That's true, and there is evidence of "they" being used as a singular as far back as over 700 years ago, but only within the last few decades has it been formally accepted by style guides, like the APA or the Chicago Manual.