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From: Chris Croughton <chris@keristor.net>
Newsgroups: alt.languages.english
Subject: Re: her instead of "his or her"
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 19:10:59 +0000
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On Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:15:18 -0800, Miss Elaine Eos
<Misc@*your-pants*PlayNaked.com> wrote:
> Historically, English used the masculine pronoun to refer to either
> gender, as in "if someone decides to waste his time..." but, in the 70s
> and 80s, as "women's rights" was gaining a large portion of the popular
> mindset, some folks switched to "his or her", as in "if someone wants to
> waste his or her time..." Then, some VERY progressive people got it
> into their heads that it would somehow make things "even" if they used
> "her" the way the language had classically used "his" to mean anyone of
> indeterminent gender. On the one hand, it's sort of sweet; on the
> other, some people use it as a slap in the face, a sort of
> "neener-neener, how do *YOU* like it?" kind of thing which, IMO, is
> highly inappropriate.
It can also backfire, as when a manual on using a word processor,
written by a woman, used 'her' all the way through. The unintended
effect was to reinforce the stereotype of women as secretaries!
Whenever I see something using 'her' as a generic I read it as "this
person has a chip on their shoulder".
Switching between them randomly is plain silly. I even prefer the
neologisms 'zie' and their ilk.
> "Their is safest", with "his" not too terribly far behind, and "his or
> her" more accurate, yet clumsy, and will probably be cut by any
> professional editors.
I dislike the use of singular 'their' because it grammatically implies
the plural, and whichever way it is used seems wrong:
"They were playing with their ball."
"They was playing with their ball."
The first reads as though there were a plurality of people playing with
a ball (which by implication was communally owned), whereas the second
is just wrong grammatically (although frequent in some dialects, notably
East London).
I have a tendency, when people insist on being "politically correct"
(and grammatically incorrect) in use of pronouns, to refer to them using
the neuter. If they don't want to be identified as male or female that
leaves the obvious gender...
Chris C
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