Re: He/She/?

On Sat, 25 Dec 1999, Fabian wrote:

> > It's already happened, despite my best efforts to tstop it among my
> > students:
> >
> > he= masculine
> > she= feminine
> > they= neutral
>
> Why stop it? It was normal until the 18th century, when prescriptivists
> decided that a single grammar ought to work for both English and Latin, and
> so tried telling everyone that singular 'they' was wrong. I like to think of
> it as teh original English langauge re-asserting itself.
I don't mind it in spoken English, but if they're going to pretend to be
business men and business women they're going to ahve to learn to sound
educated, and in this century (and maybe for a bit of the next) that means
knowing where to put the fricking apostrophes, how to conjugate strong
verbs, and remembering that "they" refers to more than one person.