Spelling on the net
Kay Dekker
>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