5:28 PM
Once upon a time, there was a fish called Monica Ceelio.
She was pretty much the nicest fish around, and a lot of people looked up to her.
Among her many hobbies, she was a moderator for Writing Fishtank Exchange.
(This isn't particularly relevant, but it shows that the English language and writing in general is something she's passionate about.)
Like many enthusiasts, she had strong opinions on completely benign, minorly-divisive topics.
(I mean Vim v.s. Emacs kind of thing.)
Did I mention she was one of the nicest fish around?
Anyway, whilst chatting with other fish in the Teacher's Tank, she let people know that she didn't use singular they.
(And really, it's a grammatical mess, as is singular you – and, in fact, if it weren't for singular they, people may have pushed harder against the loss of thou a few centuries ago and we wouldn't be in this situation… but I digress; it's not unique in English in that it doesn't follow the patterns in other parts of the language.)
This was fine, until another fish said that they wanted people to use "they" when talking about them in the third person.
This lead to a debate, much like the one we had in The Nineteenth Byte.
The debate made the fish feel very bad – not least because they were arguing against Monica Ceelio, who was very well-respected (and for good reason) – they cared a lot about her opinion, and this almost felt like rejection.
Fishtank Overflow didn't really participate in this discussion – probably because they didn't know how important it was, or maybe most of the Fishtank employees were busy, or the tank's official stance hadn't been decided. I don't know.
This, however, set a precedent.
And such discussions started coming up more frequently.
These discussions turned what was a perfectly benign language quirk into something that made some of the other fish actively excluded.
Until enough was enough, and Fishtank Overflow had to put an end to it.
(I've omitted personal information that makes me really sure that Monica wasn't acting out of malice.)