useful when referring to a single person of indeterminate gender, where the plural form themselves might seem incongruous, as in: "It is not an actor pretending to be Reagan or Thatcher, it is, in grotesque form, the person themself." — Ian Hislop (1984); quoted in Fowler's Regional preferences The Canadian government recommends themselves as the reflexive form of singular they for use in Canadian federal legislative texts and advises against using themself. Usage They with a singular antecedent goes back to the Middle English of the 14th century (slightly younger than they with a plural antecedent, which was borrowed from Old Norse in the 13th century), and has remained in use for centuries in spite of its proscription by traditional grammarians beginning in the mid 18th century. Informal spoken English exhibits universal use of the singular they. An examination by Jürgen Gerner of the British National Corpus published in 1998 found that British speakers, regardless of social status, age, sex, or region, used the singular they more often than the gender-neutral he or other options. Prescription of generic he Alongside they, it has historically been acceptable to use the pronoun he to refer to an indefinite person of any gender, as in the following: "If any one did not know it, it was his own fault." — George Washington Cable, Old Creole Days (1879); quoted by Baskervill & Sewell. "Every person who turns this page has his own little diary." — W. M. Thackeray, On Lett's Diary (1869); quoted in Baskervill & Sewell, An English Grammar. The earliest known explicit recommendation by a grammarian to use the generic he rather than they in formal English is Ann Fisher's mid-18th century A New Grammar assertion that "The Masculine Person answers to the general Name, which comprehends both Male and Female; as, any Person who knows what he says." (Ann Fisher as quoted by Ostade) Nineteenth-century grammarians insisted on he as a gender-neutral pronoun on the grounds of number agreement, while rejecting "he or she" as clumsy, and this was widely adopted: e.g. in 1850, the British Parliament passed an act which provided that, when used in acts of Parliament "words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females". Baskervill and Sewell mention the common use of the singular they in their An English Grammar for the Use of High School, Academy and College Class of 1895, but