Recorded in
“The Despatches, Minutes, and Correspondence, of the Marquess Wellesley, K. G.: During His Administration in India”
Edited by Montgomery Martin
Published by J. Murray, 1836
vol.2 – Page 736-7

Recorded in
“The Despatches, Minutes, and Correspondence, of the Marquess Wellesley, K. G.: During His Administration in India”
Edited by Montgomery Martin
Published by J. Murray, 1836
vol.2 – Page 736-7

1889: //The expectations of the patient and their friends may be moderated so far as to be fulfilled; ….//

1904-5: //… because of the peculiar confidential relations between a patient and their physician ….//

You object to the use of they when the antecedent is a student, a tenant used indefinitely. It’s not clear to me whether it’s the presence of a as distinct from any, every, etc. that creates the discomfort, or the use of semantically unbleached nouns.

If the former, I give you Thackeray’s Vanity Fair xli (1848): “A person can’t help their birth.” If the latter, I give you Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South (1855): “I was never aware of any young lady trying to catch me [matrimonially], nor do I believe that anyone has ever given themselves that useless trouble”. (This example is particularly interesting because it shows that indefiniteness rather than gender-inclusiveness is the motive: all the possible referents of the indefinite are female.) An example of the features combined is said to appear in Doris Lessing’s work, though I do not know the novel in question nor its date: “And how easy the way a man or woman would come in here, glance around, find smiles and pleasant looks waiting for them, then wave and sit down by themselves.”

(For what it’s worth, only about one or two in a thousand of the Google hits for rant are accompanied by right-wing, so your use of “usually” is misplaced.)

Since you agree that splitting is not ungrammatical, I fail to understand the basis for a rule like “Split only when you must”. It has the flavor of the hypothetical rule “Use each only when you must; every otherwise”: both draw the natural retort “Why ever?” Some things in English are just optional, and splitting infinitives is one of them.

The whole point of my earlier comment on Indo-European was to deny that there are such things as essential, as distinct from frequently appearing, ancestral, or widely used but independently developed, features of that language family. And there are black Cowans because some of us (notably my daughter) have engaged in what used to be called miscegenation (as you know, mis- in this word is not the pejorative prefix): wherefore I am white, as my ancestor John J. was, and my grandson Dorian Cowan is black. It’s as simple as that.