I'd read articles by Richard Lederer in the Mensa Bulletin for a long time, and had the pleasure of hearing him speak a couple of times last year. A lot of wordplay and Spoonerisms, interspersed with teaching about language and grammar.
His view is that grammar rules are meant to be broken. Not in a random fashion, but by changes in usage. In the old days, the masculine was the default third person singular personal , to be used whenever gender was in doubt. So a grammatically correct sentence might be "if someone comments on this post, he will get a quick response." "If someone calls, tell them we're not open." Or "a cat left a mole on my mat. If I catch him, he's going to get neutered fast." Many of us learned that in these situations, you treat the noun as masculine.
Then the awareness that women were people too became widespread, and we defaulted to the clumsy "he or she" unless someone was trying to make a point and just said "she." A lot of people continued on their merry way, unaware of the tempest saying "if someone comments on this post, they will get a quick response." Grammatically wrong, but P.C.
Lederer is an advocate of accepting "they" in this situation, over the awkward and tedious "he or she" which can destroy an otherwise readable piece of prose. He feels that language is a living, changing thing, and since many people speak a particular way, that way should gradually earn acceptability.
I thought of this this weekend when I read the Sunday comics. In Sally Forth, Ralph asks "If one were to describe their dog as "argumentative" would they have revealed too much?" The sentence set off the alarm bells in my head. If "one" is the subject, then surely it should be "his" dog, and "would he have revealed..." Particularly since it is Ralph speaking, and presumably he is male.
It is an uncomfortable time, grammatically...we all know the formerly proper term "chairman" has become "chairwoman" or "chairperson". In fact, the only one that doesn't sound right not is "chairman", even if we know we are speaking about a man. Okay, maybe I exaggerate, but not by a lot.
I found this interesting discussion on Maven's Word of the Day. It seems that this problem, (and proposed solutions to it), has been around for centuries. The article lists many words that have been proposed, including these since the 1970's: tey, term, tem, ze, zim, zees, zeeself, ne, nis, ner, en, es, ar, po, xe, jhe, et, ets, and etself.
Whew, daunting. Though I have no doubt that if one gained traction, we'd all adapt quickly enough. Witness the ease with which we adopted "Ms." to replace an unknown personal pronoun. I'm much more comfortable saying "Ms." if I don't know if it should be "Mrs.," "Miss", "Doctor", or some other salutation. I think eventually, an epicene pronoun will come to stay.
[Image via the fed]
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