All Comments on 'Sex and the Personal Pronoun'

....but what's the big deal as long as we have gender neutral plurals being virtually transitional? They can make up their minds too!!!!!

grammerians run amok. TK U MLJ LV NV

One thinks that the answer might be, "When in Rome, one does as the Romans do." Does one not?

at least you can be sure that you spelled the incontinent correctly, or did you confuse the intellectual, with the wot is sexual.... how i have missed your quaint misguided logic..are you truly circumlocutionisied ? we must do lunch darling! and you simply must read something other than Sam Clemens.... why not start with Goethe? you might glean something about gender from that, and to boot, sexuality. I must confess I am beginning to see your fascination with lil ol Tom Saywer as a lil disturbin...jus joshin. But we do so love to quibble. Don't we.

Do the words " self appointed " mean anything to you? My Don Quixote de La Mancha, your limp lance is only waiting to be spanked by the windmill of......ahhh well you know wot i mean...kisses xxxx

It is common practice to use the plural. Unacceptable to a lawyer, no doubt, but, whether the reader is a he or a she, they must make up their own mind about the story.

or two:

whose absence make precision clumsy|No, the antecedent is “absence”, singular, so verb-noun agreement should be whose absence makes precision clumsy. Dammit, stay awake, copy editor! Or don’t write essays at 2 a.m., after copy editing someone else’s work, and while decent people are asleep.

For the possessive adjective here, we have "his" and "her"|No you don’t, For the possessive adjective here, we have "his" and "hers"

Ah well. That's life in the engineers.

Words may be your element but, obviously, punctuation is not!

horse shit springs to mind!

Make up their mind about this story'

You cite this case: "The reader must make up his or her own mind about this story." There is nothing here that requires this subject to be singular. You might consider making the subject plural: "Readers must make up their own minds about this story." I often find that small edits can avoid the issue of the problematic pronouns entirely.

Or, maybe, "Each mind must itself decide."

That evades the issue altogether. And, as a bonus, it's much less wordy.

It will even satisfy the troglodytes who believe that only the members of one sex (Not "gender"---that's properly just a linguistic term. Words are of one gender or another; people are of one sex or another.) have minds.