I have commented several times in this blog about Matt Parker, most famous for his appearances in videos by the popular Numberphile YouTube channel, who is a popularizer of mathematics and who has made many extremely interesting, didactic and entertaining videos, and how at some point he apparently became convinced or indoctrinated into trying to shove the use of the pronoun "they" into the public consciousness by constantly using and overusing it in his videos, to the point of it being so obnoxious as to make his videos almost unwatchable (and, indeed, there are several relatively recent videos of his that I have still not watched in their entirety because I couldn't get past the first quarter or so because of his constant obnoxious use of "they" to refer to every single person he ever mentions). Judging from the videos he has uploaded, I estimated that he became indoctrinated some time in late 2019.
His use of "they" was often very obnoxious, and he would even forcefully insert it in sentences that didn't need them. And one particular instance of this actually made me angry, and it was when in one video he referred to Albert Einstein as "they". (Back then I wished I could just tell him "that's Professor Einstein to you, asshole!")
But, quite a lot of time has passed. Has he continued this tireless, and tiresome, crusade for trying to popularize the use of the pronoun "they" as a singular pronoun?
Astonishingly, it appears to me that to some extent he seems to have actually calmed down a bit.
In the past half a year or so he has made quite few videos where he refers to people. Several videos don't refer to any people at all. Of course that in itself is no indication of anything. However, in the videos where he does refer to people it almost seems like he has toned down the use of "they" by a significant amount. Rather than inserting the pronoun even in sentences where it's not needed, sometimes it almost feels like he's outright avoiding using it, instead using the person's name (or online nickname) repeatedly instead of using a pronoun.
He still does occasionally refer to individual people as "they", but it usually happens only when talking about people online who have sent him messages, who he doesn't know anything about, and compared to how he talked about a year ago he uses it remarkably rarely.
Quite notably, in his most recent video, "why does this balloon have -1 holes?" he repeatedly refers to one Emmy Noether, a famous mathematician, as "she", which I find quite remarkable.
I am cautiously optimistic that he has actually toned it down considerably. I might even resubscribe if this continues.
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