We readily see that the grammatical sensitivities of the Gilded Age dowager or pedant were aesthetic preferences, of the kind almost always doomed to dissolve with the passage of time. It can be harder to see that the same judgment applies to our own sense of what proper English is. Today, we have our own fads. We’re more likely to hear about using nouns as verbs – structure a lesson, impact a discussion – or making new verbs from nouns, such as liaise. Yet the verbs copy, view, worship and silence were born from nouns to no complaint. The fashion simply hadn’t yet arisen to condemn them. Or, for that matter, no fuss was made at the time when William Shakespeare and William Makepeace Thackeray, both celebrated as masters of the tongue, used they in the singular form. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/a-matter-of-fashion/