When Merriam-Webster added the use of they as a gender-neutral, singular pronoun to the dictionary recently, a whole bunch of dingdongs got bent out of shape pretending they care and know about language. King Dingdong himself, Ben Shapiro, went on a lengthy rant about it that concluded “once and for all that logic has gone out the window” because of this decision.

Of course these dingbats are totally wrong and don’t actually give a shit about language, but instead smuggle bad faith ideas into the discourse by pretending to be serious, “rational” thinkers.

The argument against a singular personal pronoun ‘they’ is basically that of prescriptivism – that there is a defined, “correct” use of language and that’s the be-all end-all forever. It’s basically linguistic authoritarianism. So with this argument, “they” hasn’t referred to a singular gender-neutral person in the past, so it’s not in the rule book, so that means it’s illogical and we shouldn’t do it.

This is a total sham of a perspective, though, because our language changes all the time and if you’re upset about “they”, you’ll need to be upset about how flirt actually means to flick something and hussy is actually equivalent to saying housewife. Except, wait, those words haven’t meant that in almost 500 years. So either language evolves and we all understand that is a real thing that happens or there’s a whole lot more words these dipshits need to be angry about, which they coincidentally seem to have not been angry about publicly.

The thing is, the singular form of the pronoun “they” has been around for 600 years and we use it in a bunch of other ways people don’t bat an eye at (e.g. “If anybody wants their refund, they can get it at the register.”). “You” went through the exact same thing. It was a plural pronoun until the 1700s when it took over for singular use, too. I don’t see these dingdongs talking about the scourge that singular “you” has on the English language.

See, these people aren’t actually upset about language. They can’t possibly be, because if they thought about linguistics for more than five seconds, they would discover language evolves all the time and even has within their own lifetime and they roll with those punches.

So what could these people’s concerns possibly be about when they complain about this topic? What a coincidence this happens to be a political topic and all of the complaints come from right wingers frothing at the mouth about “SJWs” in the same breath they decry the gender neutral usage of they as illogical.

And that’s what these complaints are actually about: Dingdongs like Shapiro want to complain about the world changing because they’re bigoted garbage and don’t actually care if they’re wrong, as long as they can put their boot on the neck of someone below them.

They is a gender-neutral pronoun. Don’t be a dingdong.