Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Educated English writers, including Shakespeare, have been using "they" as a gender-neutral third-person pronoun since Middle English. I believe there's even evidence of this in Old English. It's only been in the past century that proscriptionist grammarians have dreamed up this pedantic rule and sought to eliminate English's sole gender-neutral singular pronoun. But since educated writers and common folk al…
Couldn't agree more. The prescriptivist intervention wasn't in the past century, though, it was in the 18th. It's been traced to a single grammatical treatise—I forget the name but can look it up if there's interest—which argued for singular "he" as the standard. Ironically, the book was written by a woman—how's that for troll fodder?
Ironically, most of the people I know who now advocate for the gender-neutral third-person singular "they", and from whom I learned its history, have classical training to some degree or another.
Thanks for the correction -- I'll have to try and track down that book.