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From: jlg@lanl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Gender-specific responses to s/he (their)
Message-ID: <19239@lanl.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 10-Jan-85 14:58:47 EST
Article-I.D.: lanl.19239
Posted: Thu Jan 10 14:58:47 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 13-Jan-85 06:48:22 EST
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Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
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> Simply put, 'they' and 'their' have been used in this way for centuries,
> and people are not about to stop now.  If it's good enough for Shakespeare,
> Milton and Wordsworth, it's good enough for me.
> 
> Furthermore, s/he and the ilk are ugly and tend to derail my train of thought.


Use of the plurals derails my thought train. take:

        The pilot of a single place aircraft should take care of their
        health so as to always remain alert.

Who's health?  Is taking care of a lot of people's health a known way of
keeping alert?  To me the word 'their' is clearly not a reference to 'the
pilot'.  In this case I would use 'his', though 'his/her' would be more
acceptable than 'their'.  (When I use 'his' in a place like this I don't
usually think of a male person - just a person.  Maybe it's because my first
flight instructor was female (-8 )).

Some places the use of the plural pronoun is acceptable.  The singular words
'everyone' and 'noone' take the plural pronoun fairly naturally since both
include (or exclude) large classes of people.  But if the referent of the
pronoun in both syntactically and semantically singular (especially if the
number is explicitly given), then the plural pronoun seems VERY unnatural.
Note that the list of famous writers who used the plural pronoun in this
way ALWAYS used it only for those referents that were semantically plural
(everyone, noone, etc.).

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Women have always had their own pronouns, men have to share theirs -
the language is therefore biased in favour of women.  (*8

                                                James Giles