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Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:38:53 +0000
From: Richard Polhill <richard.news@polhill.vispa.invalid>
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Subject: Re: her instead of "his or her"
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Lucio Crusca wrote:
> "If someone decides to waste her time to translate this stuff..."
>
> the word "her" is wrong or, at least, restricts the meaning to women. On the
> other hand I'm pretty sure that several articles on the net use "her" to
> refer indifferently to men and women in similar sentences. Unfortunately I
> have no examples at hand and searching for "her" with google gives a little
> too many results...
>
To be truly non-gender-specific, one would use the plural 'their' instead of
'her' in the above sentence.
However, there is nothing wrong with the sentence as it is. Today many
publications will switch between 'his' and 'her' for different third-party
cases so as to promote equality and stay slightly more personal, but the
practice is questionable.
In the sentence given, you need to use the present participle of the verb to
translate instead of the infinitive form:-
"If someone decides to waste her time translating this stuff..."
I wish I had the ability to explain why. :-)
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