Why do apps refer to singular users as ‘they’ instead of using ‘he’ or ‘she’?
Question: what do you do when you need to write a pronoun for a single person that can be of any gender? For years, those were the alternatives: Change the structure of your sentence (not always possible). Use the name of the person (not always known, might be weird when used in a few sentences). Use just ‘he’ or just ‘she’ (might insult the other gender). Use ‘he/she’ or ’he or she’ (sounds clunky and too formal). Use ‘one’ (makes the sentence sound robotic). Use ’it’ (as if they were objects). All of these options are either lame or potentially insulting, so UX writers and product managers had to find creative ways to bypass them. Singular ‘they' Lately, more and more applications have started to use the term ‘they’ as a pronoun for a single person. Here’s one example taken form Uber’s arrival notification. Notice how the entire sentence is written as if the driver is a “they”. As I’m not a native English speaker, I thought I missed an English lesson back i...