Comments by "HKim0072" (@HKim0072) on "S. Korean found naked and fingerless in plastic barrel in Thailand" video.

Video got there near the end. Suspects are South Koreans and not local Thais.
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@0xyGen_2.p0 lol, thanks for answering. (also, if you don't know the gender, the proper terminology is "they" even if it's a singular person.)
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@0xyGen_2.p0 This isn't a recent English vernacular rule. The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf. Except for the old-style language of that poem, its use of singular they to refer to an unnamed person seems very modern. Here’s the Middle English version: ‘Hastely hiȝed eche . . . þei neyȝþed so neiȝh . . . þere william & his worþi lef were liand i-fere.’ In modern English, that’s: ‘Each man hurried . . . till they drew near . . . where William and his darling were lying together.’
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@0xyGen_2.p0 I cheated a bit. It's been an "argument" and they've been debating about it for centuries. But, on the pure merits of "grammar". (This is way before the modern "culture" debate.) Toward the end of the twentieth century, language authorities began to approve the form. The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) not only accepts singular they, they also use the form in their definitions. Former Chief Editor of the OED Robert Burchfield, in The New Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1996), dismisses objections to singular they as unsupported by the historical record. Burchfield observes that the construction is ‘passing unnoticed’ by speakers of standard English as well as by copy editors, and he concludes that this trend is ‘irreversible’.
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@eder2153 All three suspects are Koreans. One was caught in Korea. The other 2 fled to other countries in SE Asia (One caught in Cambodia. One still missing in Myanmar.)
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@brotherlynch6977 Yeah, we just didn't have the info in the past. Now, we can access grammarians for the past centuries in 1 minute searches. Language changes over time and right or wrong gets influenced by popular uses. The past usage focused on anonymity where recently is been associated with ambiguity. The biggest case for "they" as singular: journalism. Sometimes journalists don't want to give information about their source. So, they use "they" instead of repeating "the source" or "he/she".
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@0xyGen_2.p0 Well, you aren't wrong. But, that's not why I think the grammarians accepted it. In 1794, a contributor to the New Bedford Medley mansplains to three women that the singular they they used in an earlier essay in the newspaper was grammatically incorrect and does no ‘honor to themselves, or the female sex in general.’ To which they honourably reply that they used singular they on purpose because ‘we wished to conceal the gender,’ and they challenge their critic to invent a new pronoun if their politically-charged use of singular they upsets him so much. The biggest argument is "you" which had controversy in singular / plural. Now, it's basically accepted as both. You functioned as a polite singular for centuries, but in the seventeenth century singular you replaced thou, thee, and thy, except for some dialect use. That change met with some resistance. In 1660, George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, wrote a whole book labelling anyone who used singular you an idiot or a fool. And eighteenth-century grammarians like Robert Lowth and Lindley Murray regularly tested students on thou as singular, you as plural Honestly, we didn't have google before, so we just followed textbook rules, lol. I googled it a few years ago. That's why I use "they" now in certain situations (again, not in context of current "culture" stuff).
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