>One of the current trends in the english language seems to be the search for a gender neutral pronoun to replace he, his, him, etc. It seems that these have been (or are in process of being) replaced by they, their, and them respectively. (I would probably use "one" but I agree that is sounds and reads very poorly) Apparantly context will tell the reader (or listener) when the singular or plural is intended (although it is beyond me why context can't be used to distinguish between a masculine or all inclusive meaning).
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Hi Rich

As you probably know I am very interested in language and the development of English. And I think your message refers to a recent passage of mine. As to other languages, certainly in French, they seem to have no problem about the precedence of the masculine form when referring to people in general. They would say, for eg, "A person has to pay for his own mistakes", rather than "A person has to pay for their own mistakes". It bugs me that modern "pc" thinking and perhaps a hangover from the womens' (wimmins) lib movement have pushed us down this path. Next we'll be referring to Mankind as Personkind (it's already happened with "chairperson", etc.) (oops I see that this has already been mentioned -well I echo it)

I looked back to some old schoolwork of mine, from the 70's, and was surprised to find that even I had been using the "They" form even as far back as then. What irks me is when it gets even further corrupted, by passages such as (a woman speaking): "I would like to meet a nice man ... but they would have to be kind and like pets ..." For Godsakes, does one need to disguise the gender when it has already been stated!?

The word is also used slyly, to hide gender from the recipient, e.g.

(boyfriend) "Where were you last night?"
(girlfriend) "I was with a friend" (happened to be male)
(b) "What were you doing?
(g) "I was helping them with their accounts"

Then we come to the reflexive pronoun:

"They aught to learn to debug the code themselves" :-)

Shouldn't that then be "themself"?

We just get into deeper and deeper water with ways of getting round this fear of offending the female gender (can't say women!). Official documents/help text: "The user must decide if he/she wishes to save his/her amendments".

Why can't we just wipe the slate clean and go back to simple male precedence (or female for that matter - I don't care)? Everyone knows that "male" isn't implied. However, if we did use the female form, in the above user example:

"The user must decide if she wishes to save her amendments" might be construed as an insult on womankind, suggesting that only women will be the menial clerks who use the system.

My two-penn'orth

Terry