I asked someone I know (smart, nice guy, with a thick NW2) how his date from two Fridays ago went. He responded with (paraphrasing) "they thought I seemed nice, they said they'd be interested in meeting up again, they seemed enthusiastic."
Can you notice anything non-standard?
The use of "they" in describing how his date was received. I told him that I noticed the use of the word "they", and I asked him if he was hooking up with a couple as part of a threesome, I don't remember if I gave him an impressed congratulatory nod when asking that. He said no, he wasn't hooking up with a couple. He just prefers to use gender-neutral language. Later on in our conversation he switched to using "she", he may have perceived that I found this unnatural.
This use of "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun is an emerging thing. Some people (I don't know if there are any outside academia) are against the use of "he" and "she" as it carries gendered connotations, and thus may serve to perpetuate discrimination. Many are arguing that we should instead all shift to using "they" as default, for both men and women.
I can kind of understand this when writing recommendation letters (which is the context in which I heard people advocate for "they"), but not here. Part of me wants to tell him that it may in fact be preferable to use gendered language in an explicitly and naturally gendered context like dating.
However, I worry that this may be antagonizing to him. Further, a lot more people know him since I'm still relatively new here, and it bothers me tht nobody has pointed this out to him.