NEW FROM THE FRONT:
The war over the appropriate way to refer gender neutrally to somebody in the third person singular wages on, but today I saw something that indicated a small victory for the Populists.
"John Smith added "Physicalism- or something near enough" to their favorite books."
Facebook's mini-feed has adopted the singular they to refer to persons who have not specified a sex on their profiles. Another point goes to everyday usage becoming mainstream despite the prescriptive grammarians and the Spivak faction.
11.12.2006
Gender neutral third person singular pronoun update
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3 comments:
for more facebook pronoun fun - if you type "our" in your status, it's automatically changed to "their".
congratulations on that thing that happened yesterday! i wish i could have witnessed the swinging, but i was bartending.
haha sorry seb, i thought this was cristi's post for some reason. just ignore the second half of my comment.
sorry to be a bit slow with this, but i wanted to link to an old post of scott's on the 'they' issue:
they're out there
it's bound to happen! facebook is just another (and even more codified) link in the chain...
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