<i>Speaking of pretentious-douchebag-grammar-nerds, allow me to explain the evolution of the “I’m going to refer to a singular noun with a plural pronoun” linguistic phenomenon. It’s a product of increased gender equality. People used to generically refer to everyone as males</i><p>That's entirely and entirely typically wrong. Singular "they" has been well-established in English for centuries. The great writers have always used it freely—that includes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and seemingly everybody else. "A person can't help their birth," says Becky Sharp in <i>Vanity Fair</i>. (Edit: it's fun to dig up these classical examples, because they sound so modern and fresh. "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes"—Wilde. "It's enough to drive anyone out of their senses"—Shaw. "Everybody does and says what they please"—Byron.)<p>The ironic thing is that the "rule" about generic "he" (and later, "he or she" and all the other stilted variants) was fabricated by grammarians who looked at how English actually worked, said "Goodness no that can't be right because Latin doesn't do that", and started telling everybody their grammar was wrong.<p>(Notice how I just used singular "they". Should I have said, "telling everybody his grammar was wrong"? Or "his or her", or "his/er", or just "her", if you're one of those? Or, to adapt the OP's suggestion, "telling everybody everybody's grammar was wrong"?)<p>People never stopped using it, though, and by 1850 the grammarians were so indignant about this that they petitioned the British Parliament to make "he" the legal standard. And people kept on using "they", because it works.<p>Edit: There are so many sources on this that you can't kick Google without stirring some up, but <a href="http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/" rel="nofollow">http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-th...</a> and <a href="http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html</a> are particularly good and <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html" rel="nofollow">http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h...</a> is hilarious.