But the usage is already common. It is now almost a decade since the New Shorter Oxford Dictionary recorded it, noting only that it was considered erroneous by some. I do not believe it is a passing fad.

We have long passed the day when we could take refuge in the lawyer’s defence: ‘a reference to the masculine gender includes a reference to the feminine gender’. The Acts Interpretation Act in South Australia does not even say it that way anymore. We all tried he/she for a while, and rightly rejected this form as an abomination. It was easier in spoken English, but now people who conscientiously say ‘he or she’ whenever the singular pronoun ought to be gender-neutral are beginning to sound self-conscious.

There are still ways of avoiding the usage. Again in South Australia, the Office of Parliamentary Counsel uses ‘that person’ in all draft legislation. This adds to the clarity of legislation, but we are not all, or not always, drafting laws or contracts, so it will not do for general use.

Often, it is enough to recast what we are saying or writing so that it is entirely in the plural, but there is a price. There is a loss of force, of directness. Expressing something in the singular means that what is being said applies to each and every case regardless of individual variations. It makes clear that what is being said is not merely a general rule to which there may be exceptions. That is why the lawyers prefer to draft in the singular.

We will get used to they as a singular pronoun, because we have to. It will join the many English words that have the same form in the singular as in the plural. After all, we used to think it was wrong, and not merely improbable, to say, ‘Collingwood are playing like champions’. Now we accept that this refers to the footballers, and not the suburb – which always takes a singular verb.

But that is another conversation.