On 11/4/05, me22 <me22.ca@gmail.com> wrote:
My personal preference is to use "they" as the first person singular gender-neutral pronoun. This will be /intensely/ irritating to grammar purists, but does seem to be the way the language is evolving.
"They" is /not/ a singular pronoun, and to me it just makes it look as though the writer is ignorant.
There are some historical examples of singular they. For the interested, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they Also, in case there's any remaining who is curious, Wikipedia does a good job of summing up gender-neutral pronouns at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun which includes mention of the obscure Spivak pronouns, as well as sie and hir, xe, and ve -- though I'm not suggesting any of them be used. Ben