At 22:23 +0000 on 06/17/2015, J O Skip Robinson wrote about Re: OT
STCK question:
The he/she/they conundrum in English is just another flavor of the
same problem. Once we commit to the sex of a pronoun, it's hard to
use it for the opposite gender, even to the point where we give into
number anomaly in order avoid gender anomaly. The boy-girl
distinction sits at the core of our world view.
The problem is that there is no gender neutral/un-specified singular.
The use of they (and its forms) is what we end up with when we are
referencing a single person of either gender. In many cases the
singular can be used in the context of a group where we are talking
about any individual in the group as an individual.
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