On 6/13/2015 10:26 AM, Tofu Ninja wrote:
Actually I think it matters more if the person you are talking to knows the gender of the person you are talking about, in the shop sentence the gender of the friend is unknown to the person you are talking to so "they" still works.
So then, use the gender-specific pronoun and the listener is no longer in the dark! What the listener knows or doesn't know doesn't play into it in this case. 'My friend' is a specific person, and specific people have a gender. Someone, anyone, a person, a human, etc... are all generic, so the gender is always unknown to the speaker.
