On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 06:36:20AM +0100, John Darrington wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 08:45:27PM +0000, ng0 wrote:
> 
>      ps Cl??ment: 'them'/'they' are pronouns if you don't know the gender and/or
>      prefered pronoun of a person :)
> 
> 
> ... according to some. -  but most linguists, and many orators (the president of 
> the Free Software Foundation being one of them) consider this to be a misuse of 
> the English language and refuse to (mis)use these words for such a purpose.

As a native USA English speaker, I think this usage is fine, and widely
accepted by speakers, at least in this country. There are some cases
where it sounds a little clunky, but we don't have other words for this
use case that enjoy wider common usage.