As further evidence that Twitter has taken over all manners of human communication, CNN writes up a little tweetish battle over the ellusive search for a gender neutral pronoun:

“Can’t we English-speakers just agree upon a gender-neutral pronoun?” attorney Paul Easton recently Twittered. “Tired of PC grammar gymnastics.”

…

Consider the sentence “Everyone loves his mother.” The word “his” may be seen as both sexist and inaccurate, but replacing it with “his or her” seems cumbersome, and “their” is grammatically incorrect.

But that’s silly. “Their” is it! “Their” is what we agreed upon! “Their” is the daring little pronoun the English language chose!

If we’re in such desperate need of a gender neutral pronoun, then we should simply stop correcting people when they say “everyone loves their mother.” How is using their in that sentence any more grammatically incorrect than using ip or thon or any of the other nonsense word jabberwoky the article mentions?

Sure it might be slightly messy or logically inconsistent, but 1) this is English, the bastard stepchild of tribal West Germany and whoreish France, and 2) we’ve actually been using a singular they for like 600 years.

Some old school English speaker had a problem, and they* solved it! A long time ago, and no one seemed to notice.

* See! See!