Singular "They"

Found this NYT article via Gruber. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m impressed with Gruber’s attention to grammatical detail.

I’d figured for a while that “they” as a universal pronoun was becoming so common that it would eventually force its way into proper use. I hadn’t realized that it used to be proper use.

It seems that there’s some precedent for common mistakes becoming new rules. “Factoid” (pardon the self-link) is a word that was so commonly misused that it developed a new meaning to accommodate the errors.