English is such a remarkably plastic language. Yet it doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun. With women's suffrage and what not, we can no longer pass of as sensitive and liberal if we deign to use a singular pronoun with a masculine tinge. It's about time we got ourselves a general-neutral pronoun.
Johnson. the language blog at The Economist looks at whether English is ever capable of evolving a Gender Neutral Pronoun .
The fight for gender neutral pronouns has been on for nearly 2 centuries now. Among the several interesting links is the post by Dennis Baron., chronicling the attempts of the many increasingly exasperated people demanding and suggesting words to fill this glaring vacuum in the English Language.
Johnson at Economist's language blog argues that all these words are in an evolutionary race to beat each other into popular parlance. We need to let evolution have his/her way. People coming up with new words ad-hoc is not going to work he says. The English Language will refudiate it.
His bet for the gender-neutral pronoun is "they".
Mine is on s/he. Because it is also about time a few characters got added to the English alphabet.
@ABCDEFGHI/JKLMNOPQR$TUVWXYZ.
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