I guess you will quote to me Psalm 8:4-6. But this is NOT, as is very clear from the context, a prophecy about Jesus. The Hebrew words literally translated “son of man” in the Old Testament never refer to Jesus, but refer to humanity in general and sometimes (especially in Ezekiel) to a contemporary individual. Daniel 7:13 is Aramaic using different vocabulary.

Really? I would have thought it’s almost always used by the common people. I never hear “Can the driver of the blue Volkswagen Beetle please move his car…”

If one of your friends used it in conversation would you tell them they’re wrong?

I understand it’s in dictionaries, and even used by a small segment of the scholarly elite–but it has extremely low to almost know usage among the common people. At least I wouldn’t understand it to mean plural, or my friends.

Especially when prophecies about Jesus (especially when they are quoted in the New Testament) are plural in the TNIV and singular in the Hebrew then I feel it goes a little to far

“The first person who scores… I will buy them a beer!”

It’s not the first time I’ve noticed the use of ‘they/them’ when the gender in question is actually quite clear. I guess you could say that in English the indefiniteness of the antecedent overpowers the genderness. People avoid ‘he/him, she/her’ because it makes the antecedent too specific. It’s a discourse feature of English. Other languages have other ways to deal with this.

But in English we do this:

“The first person who scores… I will buy them a beer!”

“Johnny scored a goal.”

“Great, I’ll buy him a beer.”

The thing that changes is the definiteness of the antecedent. In the first case it’s unknown, in the second it’s known. We’d hardly accuse a football coach of having a feminist agenda.

Yes, “they” is grammatically a third person plural pronoun. But for millions of English speakers, it also serves as a gender-neutral pronoun which takes an indefinite pronoun as its antecedent. I suspect that a majority of English speakers today use “they” in this way as an indefinite pronoun. When it serves in this way, it is semantically neither a plural nor a singular. Instead it is at that point an indefinite, just as are other English pronouns such as everyone, everybody, anyone, someone, no one, etc.

Notice which pronoun is used by most English speakers today, at least when speaking, and often when writing in indefinite contexts. Fill in the blank in the following sentences with the pronoun (his, her, he, she, their, them, they, you, your, our, us, etc.) which is most commonly used by your neighbor, Jim Dobson, C.S. Lewis, and many others:

1. If everyone turns in ____ book report on time, I will treat the class with pizza.

2. Someone is at the door. I wonder who ____ are.

3. Any nurse who wishes to keep ____ job must maintain an accurate log of medicines administered to each patient.

4. If anyone will welcome me when I knock on ____ door, I’ll have a wonderful dinner with ____.

5. If I find out who took my saw and didn’t return it, I’ll make ____ clean my wood shop for the next month.