It’s/they’re now incorrect that any one/anyone of us who/that speaks English has/have to take a side on the pronoun gender wars because those wars have come to an end. According to Merriam-Webster’s words of the year, “they” and “themself” is/are the preferred singular pronouns when referring to a collective man/woman noun or indefinite pronoun. Example: Anyone who/that has a baby knows that they’re loveable if not that they’re always easy.

That sentence of course makes somewhat unclear whether “they” refers to “anyone” or “a baby,” which is a problem of pronouns and their antecedents. But in years past, under the grammar education regime that OK, Boomers received, that sentence would fall under additional scrutiny because “anyone” and “baby” were considered singular to be replaced by a singular pronoun. The singular pronoun in years past that referred to the indefinite “anyone” and the collective but singular “baby” was “he,” even though at least half of the people referred to were she’s. So the correct OK, Boomer sentence would read “Anyone who has a baby knows that he’s loveable if not that he’s always easy.” In the 1970s and after when some women insisted on more gender precision, “he/she” and “him/her” or “s/he” would occasionally substitute for the traditional “he/him” usage.

These points of language hark back to the days in the 1960s before Ms., when women were referred to as Miss, if unmarried, and Mrs., if married. “Ms.” would have been the Merriam Webster’s word of 1970, if there were one, to detach the marriage assignment to women. The “Ms.” substitution led to generational arguments between the Greatest Generation and OK, Boomers as to how businesses should correctly address women in written communication. Women of the World War I generation, still very much alive at that time, argued further about the correctness of the address: Mrs. Lenore Ruppert v. Mrs. Ralph Ruppert. Mrs. Ralph Ruppert, they said, referred to married or widowed women. Mrs. Lenore Ruppert referred to a woman who was divorced. Only radical OK, Boomer women kept their “maiden” names that honored their fathers, not their mothers.

As a matter of English language history, many of these gender-related issues were fortunately resolved somewhere around 1066 when the French-speaking Normans conquered the Old English-speaking English. That’s the year that French became the formal language of the English court and of the English aristocracy and the gender-based nouns of Old English conflicted with the gender-based nouns of medieval French. Add to that gender-noun war the conflict between Old English-noun gender and Old Norse-noun gender and there was a noun-gender free for all. The Old Norse problem actually began well before 1066 as the Vikings showed up every spring in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales to mix it up with the various Celtic tribes and Anglo-Saxons who’d come over from Germany sometime in the 700’s.

The only good resolution to the noun-gender wars then resulted in the best answer. Noun-gender dropped out of English. So the linguistic contortions of medieval French speakers assigning the feminine gender to “woman,” as in “la femme,” and Anglo-Saxons assigning the neuter form to “wif” and the masculine form to “wifmann,” and Old Norse giving masculine, feminine, and neuter gender to nouns naming various types of women, such as girls, women in general, grandmothers, etc., ended. By the time of Chaucer’s middle English, say 1400, no gender was assigned to nouns and their definite and indefinite articles, “a, an, the.”

English is an amazingly elastic language, ever responsive to political sensitivities, unlike French with its Academie Francaise or French Academy that prescribes what words are acceptably French. English is the international language because it dropped gender-based nouns and incorporated words from everywhere the British Empire spread its colonial power. So, while “they” as a reference to singular gender-based nouns may sound awkward today, within 20 years or so, everyone and their uncle will adopt this pronoun usage. Now if English could just get rid of who/whom.

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.