>>>>My project has "logout" feature. When the user arrives, their is a static page of forms.
>>>
>>>Is "their" the usual shorthand for "his or her"? I've read recently that this practice of using the plural as the gender neutral pronoun is a time-honored... workaround for the total lack of reflexive pronouns in English. It was in use in XVI century literature, and though it sounds quite out of whack when you try to translate into any other language, I respect it as such.
>>
>>Hmmm... I can't tell if you're joking.
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>Good :)

Should'a known.

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>> You do realize that Terry meant "there is", don't you?
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>I did, but then chose not to realize it. Rather, left it unreal.

Well, that did add to the humor of it.

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>>His spelling and grammar should never be taken too literally.
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>Should apply to my whole self - also, not too seriously either.
>

I've been accused of taking myself too seriously, but at least I've got a sense of humor.

>>It's a common grammatical error to use "their" instead of "his" or "her", regardless of the gender obfuscation issue. Who the hell designed this language, anyway?
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>Too late, the guy was hanged long before we were born :).
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>>Even those of us who think we know English occasionally stumble into an "its" / "it's" confusion, and I'm amazed at the number of literate people who don't seem to know the difference between loose and lose!
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>The main reason why speech recognition is doing even worse than OCR is that they always start developing it from English. In many other languages, that shouldn't present much of a problem. There are just so many ways to spell the same sound, if ewe... yue... yoo... u... you get my drift.

Beyond phonetics, there are semantic ambiguities, colloquialisms, figures of speech, metaphors, euphemisms, and other creative absurdities. You're right, though. If we could just agree on a very boring, unambiguous flavor of Esperanto instead of English, things would be a lot simpler. But it might take some of the fun out of life, and I doubt that society will accept a language that deprives us of BS.