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Originally Posted by chi-o_cat
While we’re on the subject (sort of)….what’s the deal with “and them”? My significant other is Southern, and I am not. Sometimes he’ll say something like “John and them are coming over later.” Horrible grammar aside, this makes me think he means John plus at least 2 other people, when most of the time he’s actually talking about John plus one person. Is this a Southern thing?
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It's a linguistic shift and it's not just happening in the South. We are starting to use "they" and "them" as a gender neutral singular pronoun when we don't know the gender of a person or when we don't want to specify gender.
We've had shifts in pronouns like this before -- we no longer use "thee" and "thou" and "thine," just "you" and "yours."