Re: Epicene pronoun in english?

And Rosta wrote:
> I don't know whether all the epicene
> pronoun fuss is due simply to prescriptivism or whether there
> is genuinely a dialect difference with AmE here, such that AmE
> lacks the BrE solution. (It's hard to tell, what with AmE
> being so much more prescriptivist in the first place.)
At least in my idiolect, "they" is still pretty iffy.  It can be used
(indeed, is almost obligatory) with words like "someone" (when it's
actually an unknown or hypothetical; if it refers to a specific
individual, as in "Someone bought this for their wife", it's
ungrammatical in my idiolect, especially if spoken by the person who
sold it, but I've heard it from others), but is ungrammatical, or at
least questionable, with words referring to specific individuals.  Like,
the following exchange would be completely ungrammatical:

"A friend of mine is visiting tomorrow" "Are (is?) they coming for a
specific reason?"

I'd have to either guess at the gender, or avoid the pronoun issue by
saying something like "Is your friend coming for a specific reason?"

--
"There's no such thing as 'cool'.  Everyone's just a big dork or nerd,
you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." -
overheard
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