kay@warwick.UUCP (Kay Dekker) (03/29/86)
In article <217@ubu.warwick.UUCP> msj@ubu.UUCP (Mike Joy) writes: >There is a problem here ... I find "their" an unpleasant word to use in the >context of a singular pronoun, simply because it looks wrong! I therefore >find myself needing to use either "his" or "his/her", or alternatively >to rewrite the sentence in such a way that the problem does not arise. I >agree with Lisa that a straight "his" is a bad move because of its implication >that the person being referred to is male. Quite. >Firstly, does anyone know of a sensible non-sexist word that could be >used in such a situation? Indeed I do. And it's grammatical (but I don't think you'll like it). >Perhaps we ought to abolish the words "her" and "she" completely, using >"his" and "he" as being genderless ... And there my opinion diverges from yours. English (it seems to me) already *has* a pronoun that may be used to refer to entities whose gender is either unspecified or unspecifiable: IT. I've suggested this to a few friends, and, by-and-large, though they could see the grammatical propriety of "it", they felt that to apply "it" to a person would be somehow demeaning. I fail to see why... Kay. -- "I AM; YOU ARE; HELLO: all else is poetry" ... mcvax!ukc!warwick!kay