One could equally well make the complaint that it is oppressive for men to be labeled as neuters while women get special forms. Why should men be degraded to neuter objects? It seems, as mentioned above, that if notional sex is involved, the special reverence and veneration would have gone to the female with special forms.

Latin, by employing a scheme of male/female to classify nouns, tells us little about sexuality. The rough, tough, Roman laborers and military men apparently had no qualms about being ‘feminine:’ an agricola (farmer), nautes/nauta (sailor), or auriga (charioteer) were quite content with their grammatical orientation. (Of course these macho men wouldn’t have made much about it because, Jespersen reminds us, these feminine -a forms derive from abstractions ‘charioting’ and ‘sailoring’). Even the sturdy, ever-symbolic Roman phallus had to accept a feminine inflexion: mentula, feminine gender (but, no surprise, cunnus, masculine gender, cunt). In other variants, a penis becomes masculine to sopio or vomer or peniculum� — which also meant a painter’s brush, whence the word ‘pencil’ today. (– Is this why in England they put ‘rubbers’ on their pencils?) Even a ‘hard-on’ could be feminine (verpa). Generally, a whorehouse would seem to be feminine (lupanar, -aris), but a whore herself is scortum (neuter); Catullus speaks of one such scortum in the diminutive scortillum to mean ‘wench.’ Human sex and grammatical gender are two different concepts.

In the same manner, the lack of a generic form different from the masculine has led to adapting a number of other terms which were not only generic in notion but also unspecific in number, as in ‘human’ becoming pluralized to ‘humans.’ Humanus is strictly an adjectival form of the noun homo which meant the same: human person (as opposed to sex terms vir, man and femina, woman). Oh well, in any event humanum errare est. ‘Human’ signified personhood with no reference to notional sex, which is how we get it and not something like ‘huwoman.’ The word human has no connection whatsoever with the word ‘man’� — man is Germanic, not Romance, and the –man in ‘human’ is a part of a root from Romance languages hum- meaning ‘earth.’ A human is a creature ‘of the ground,’ hence its use as an adjective (and the Biblical explanation that ‘God created man from clay’); note the noun humus in Latin (and after we die, we can always be ex-hum-ed). An example of ‘side-stepping’ the bias question would be some concoction as ‘humankind’� — which still doesn’t alleviate feminist sexual frustration.

‘Man’ possessed a strictly generic sense in Old English, as does the modern Icelandic menn (people) and modern German neuter das Mann. Latin homo corresponded to ‘mankind’ as a species (vir would have been a male specifically; incidentally, this is cognate with ‘hero’ through Sanskrit and Greek). Do not confuse homosexual as homogeneous, which is the Greek prefix homos meaning ‘same.’ ‘Man’ as a shared Indo-European item can be traced to Latin as mās (really mans as a noun; but masculus > masculinus as a predicate; Gothic manna, Sanskrit manu). Old English for adult male was wæpman or wer (from Middle High German), which survives today only in ‘werewolf’� — a man-wolf (it was supposed that fierce men turned into wolves; in this sense it corresponds to ‘vir’-ile� — Latin ‘v’ was pronounced like English ‘w’). The base wæp still lives on today in the word ‘weapon.’

‘Female’ is itself a folk-corruption made on association with the spelling of ‘male.’ The correct spelling should be (from French) femelle and derives from the Latin, femella, a diminutive form of femina, woman. It has nothing to do conceptually with ‘male’ whatsoever. A similar occurrence happens with ‘herstory’ as a silly, adolescent replacement for ‘history’ or ‘womyn’ for ‘women.’ These are catchy and novel little words but the uses they are put to by hate-mongers are dubious. The base shows that the word is the same as ‘story’ but with an aspirated ‘i’ (h + story, as in istoria). The base is ίςτωρ (istor), a ‘knowing’ which is used for ιδ-τορ (id-tor) from ιδ- as base of ειδέναι, ‘to know’¹⁴� –� this base shows up in Germanic as wid-, wissen and ultimately in English as ‘wit.’ The connection between knowing through stories lies in pre-literate oral culture, when all knowledge was verbally transmitted� — not because males told it to male audiences.¹⁵

Wīf in Anglo-Saxon was a woman in general. ‘Woman’ is a corruption of wīfman (lit. woman-person). So she was a ‘female + person;’ wīfman becomes wimman by elision somewhere in the tenth century (wimmen in the plural) and this plural form is still in use today unchanged (in pronunciation). In the twelfth century it becomes wumman and gives us today’s singular.¹⁶� Note: these words followed rules or syntax, not the ‘perceptions’ of sexual identity: child (bearn), maiden (mæġden), and woman (wīfman) were all grammatically neuter. The word ‘child’ can still be encountered in speech and writing as an ‘it’: A child and its mother. Using ‘it’ for children three years or younger is interesting. It seems that an aspect of identity� — and thus consciousness� — is not present until a child has acquired the faculty of speech. The word ‘infant’ literally means a non-speaker (in, non + fari speak). Speech and consciousness of one’s autonomous identity seem to develop concurrently with language acquisition.

‘Person’ serves as a neutral, polite form because it is from Latin personare, a verb meaning ‘to sound out/through’ (as in the mask worn by actors on the stage). Per (through), sonare (to sound): the big hole in those masks worn on the stage in classical times was that persona through which one’s character came through the dialogue. So then, won’t you now ask us why not ‘perdaughter?’

It should be clear from the above excursions through our great language that the generic pronoun is conceptually devoid of notional sex, perceptions, or social oppression. The charges of bias are uninformed. Myth busted.

Alternatives to the crisis and attempts to repair

What kinds of pronouns are there? Pronouns can be personal (I, you, he, she, it, etc.), possessive (my/mine, your/yours, his, hers, their, etc.), demonstrative (this, that, these, those), interrogative (whose, which, etc.), indefinite (anyone, each one, someone, etc.), reflexive (himself, herself, ourselves, etc.), or dual (extinct in English). The term ‘epicene’ shows up frequently in the literature and refers to a single pronoun used for both genders as a generic (‘he’ or ‘thon’; see 8 below).

The relative pronoun is also afflicted by similar automatic responses: ‘The greatest teachers are those which stand out/are those who stand out/are those that stand out’ … shouldn’t it also be offensive to refer to a person as an inanimate which? A list of existing grammatical forms can not take us into what determines their use in communication. To do this, we take a look at the philosophical dimensions of language and the way these mental performances are reflected in pure, natural, speech.

The MLA Handbook (sixth edition)¹⁷ recommends avoiding, ‘If a young artist is not confident, he can quickly become discouraged’ by casting it into the plural thus: ‘If young artists are not confident, they can quickly become discouraged’ or with a relative pronoun: ‘A young artist who is not confident can quickly become discouraged.’ But this does not resolve the question. From The American Heritage Dictionary, this example is given as improper: ‘Each of the stars of It Happened One Night (Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert) won an Academy Award for his performance.’ But this is nonsense since any normal native speaker would naturally say, ‘Both of the stars of It Happened One Night, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, won Academy Awards for their performances’� — in spite of any errors in such a sentence.

The most frequent attempts to solve the problem of the offensive-repressive ‘he’ are the following:

1. Rephrasing into the passive voice. For example: ‘In this case, the owner would transfer his shares to the beneficiary’ would become, ‘In this case, the shares would be transferred to the beneficiary (by the owner).’ Interestingly enough, do not be surprised if the language police say that this is oppressive.

2. Use a plural instead of a singular subject in order to require ‘they’ as the grammatical generic;

3. Use ‘he’ and ‘she’ alternatively throughout text (but not both together);

4. Use a token/symbol that doesn’t exist like ‘s/he;’

5. Use ‘he or she’ every time throughout the text (both together);

6. Use ‘she’ only� — just let them have their way so we can get on with things already;

7. Claim that logic and syntax are old-fashioned and Eurocentric and that ‘they’ is singular. ‘Anyone can have their head examined.’ This is different from (2) because it changes the number of the pronoun from plural to singular. Thus, a new generic is formed for animate (notional) beings: he (notional male), she (notional female), it (inanimate� — no notional aspect involved), they (notional generic).

8. Create a new word ex nihilo and enforce its use in the media and grammar schools.

Charles Crozat Converse came up with ‘thon’ in 1884 and apparently (I do not have the means to verify this from where I am living) it has appeared in several dictionaries over the years. Whether this is true, it is an interesting attempt nonetheless, not to mention far ahead of its time. Its form derives from contracting ‘that one’ and is meant to be used when a pronoun might produce vagueness or to avoid repetition. Converse’s proposal is unique in that it confronts the issue from the point of view of logic and style and not sexism.

‘Either my wife or my son will call; tell thon that I’ll call back later after nine’ = Tell ‘that one’ who calls that I’ll be back after nine o’clock.’

‘Every worker on the payroll has thon own benefits clause in thon’s contract; there is no standard package for all.’

Thon is attractive to me personally because it resembles a pronoun (I wouldn’t suspect it to be a bug or a tool) and it has a nice Anglo-Saxon air about it. It sounds okay in other hypothetical sentences (thon in the nominative and accusative, thon’s for possessives, thon’s own, etc.):

‘Any employee knows that thon’s allegiance is to the company.’

‘A writer must always mind thon’s ps and qs.’

It’s quite fluid actually.

The only confusion or oddity might be that it resembles the inflected forms of the old singular form of you: thou (nominative), thee (dative and accusative), thine in the genitive/possessive cases (short form spelt ‘thy’ when followed by a consonant). But thon should be seen more as something comfortable and familiar and not bizarre. It could work if implemented accordingly in primers, textbooks, and mass-media, etc., but nobody outside academia except for the eccentrically-minded would accept it. Such proposals are always derided because, regardless of theoretical consistency and practical viability, people generally fear what’s new and unique. Compare the interesting situation of Esperanto. Things which are both novel and intellectual are doubly suspect.

A prediction for the future: one possibility is that over time, a new bastard pronoun will emerge: hiershey. Hiershey will be the nominative; himrer will be the accusative and dative; hizrer the genitive, and himrerself the reflexive.

‘A person should always keep hizrer income secret from the IRS.’

‘This is wise because hiershey could end up being robbed twice, in spite of the unlawfulness of double taxation.’

Obviously, this is what we are already doing by using two pronouns for a single concept; now they are just lumped together in writing and recognized conceptually as a singular marker. So the problem is still not resolved. The real question of the whole matter is, then, back to the beginning, whether we were not already doing this before the race-class-gender reactionaries came onto the scene. From this angle, the form of the pronoun marker is irrelevant. In such a future community of English speakers, there will still be misogynists (or ‘sexists’, because only males are sexist� — anti-male women exclude themselves). But misogynists there will say hiershe.

Clear thinking is the best way to solve the problem. Sometimes, using a natural ‘he’ or ‘him’ definitely creates an unnecessary male sense as in: ‘The applicant should take his completed form to the Human Resources window and pay his processing fee.’ The clear manner is to say, ‘Applicants should take their completed forms to the Human Resources window and pay their processing fee’ because applications come in large numbers, not singularly. Good judgment and the demands of clarity insist that writers choose the most appropriate term to the situation:

* ‘Any employee who has a grievance to report should see his or her manager.’

‘Any employee who has a grievance to report should see the manager.’ (There is one manager for all, not one for each employee.)

‘Employees with grievances to report should see the manager’/‘their manager.’

It should be evident to any speaker, normal or feminist, that the better form for a police report would be:

‘After that I remember seeing a person by the window … he or she seemed to be saying something to another person below … but I couldn’t make out what was being said.’

The identity, including gender, is not known; so we would want to be sure to express this and emphasize the question of identity with ‘he or she;’ the last part of this sentence is best in the passive voice since what was being said is of more gravity than the sex of the person saying it, as in the active voice.

Use ‘she’ when the gender is known or would normally call to mind the sex:

‘A mother can always trust her instincts.’

‘A father can always trust his instincts.’

* ‘A parent can always trust his instincts’ does not work.

‘Jimmy’s first-grade teacher wants to see us at the party.� — Did she say why?’ Use ‘he’ likewise: ‘A football player gets his kicks out of life.’

The referents are clear in:

‘The progress of mankind depends upon the unobstructed pursuit of science.’

‘A cop always carries his gun.’

‘A child loves its toys.’

‘If you really did see a gunman, how was he dressed?’

It has been proposed that for men to get an idea of what women mean when they say they feel left out, consider this example I found on the Internet (I no longer have the source) of applying the test of generic-ness to the term ‘he’:

The simple routines of the day often take up most of our attention; when your average office worker gets out of the shower, he needs time to shave, dry his hair, and put on his panty hose and lipstick … all before the question of what to wear.

Now, unless you’re going to a drag-queen freak fest, this sentence strikes us as odd because of the ‘worker’ and the ‘he’ when in fact we are supposedly dealing with women. But this counter-example is not valid because it is merely a contrived one and works backwards from what we are trying to prove to how we would speak. This is a bogus example because it is artificially constructed to meet the theory of bias; nobody would naturally say anything like this. If there are panties involved, then the pronoun is ‘she’ even before the word ‘panties’ occurs in the sentence because generically or generally, shes wear panties. It is a cultural norm. We (must) know before we begin speaking what the referent is. That some workers wear panties and others wear pants is the issue here, not the generic sexual status of ‘worker’ in the example. The objects involved determine the pronoun, not vice-versa. There is no evaluation in this fact and hence no generic content. The content is specifically feminine by virtue of what is happening in context.

Investigating the problem

When people use ‘she’ generically, they do so not out of mental reference to the female-person but out of fear of being labeled insensitive bigots and chauvinists by the institutions which have made it their ideological windmill to enforce half-baked theories of egalitarianism. After four or five generations, citizens of the former Soviet Union were never able to internalize the neutral ‘comrade;’ the term disappeared the morning after the collapse of the Red Empire. Let us look at some other linguistic phenomena which turn on and so illustrate the nature of gender.

What concepts are being symbolized verbally when we use a generic pronoun? The meaning of a word is the mental concept which the word (written, spoken, signed) symbolizes: nouns, verbs, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, etc.� — all those things which are ultimately derived from sense experience and are understood through context. Context also allows for homophones and punning; it lets us go freely from one meaning to another using the same word. The term ‘figure,’ in an example given by Lewis,¹⁹ can be spoken of at one moment as a bill of charge (I can’t make out this figure� — how much do I owe you?), a human body a little while later (Wow, she has a great figure!), and a few minutes after that in conversation, one might praise a ‘figure of speech’ and, in response to a piece of gossip concerning a controversial ‘political figure,’ reply, ‘I figured as much.’ Pronouns, likewise, do not have to refer to one and only one idea: ‘I am writing now’ and ‘There is no I in the word group’ use the first person personal pronoun for two conceptually different purposes. Similarly, ‘Joe and Jane said they would be on time’ and ‘As they say, no good deed goes unpunished’ are different uses of they. This is analogous to what is happening in generic reference. As there is by definition no sex idea involved in a generic referent, a single lexical item can perform various tasks (he as a male; he as any person, he-he as a short laugh). Language always tends to economy. If the brain can use an already existing lexical item to signify a new concept, it will take that form over a new and previously unknown coinage.

There is a fallacy that the signification of words is an arbitrary convention based on whim and social moment and this leads to the kind of unscrupulous theories claiming that concepts have no objective referents in reality, that they are arbitrary and socially manufactured, that the primary blocks of linguistic consciousness are changeable, that reality is an individual perspective, or that language structure determines thought. Contemporary activists in the language-bias racket are muddled in an idealist tradition that denies the concretes of existence in favor of some ‘mental state’ or, in Ayn Rand’s words, ‘accept the primacy of consciousness, by reversing the relationship of consciousness to existence, by assuming that reality must conform to the content of consciousness, not the other way around� — on the premise that the presence of any notion in man’s mind proves the existence of a corresponding referent in reality.’²⁰� This is the fallacy of the faux grammarian.

What is meant when a speaker says ‘he’ generically? As a concept of person, it takes the general idea of being human, leaving out all other quality-concepts like height, weight, facial features, age, nationality, religion, and gender, eye-color, occupation, etc. These are secondary attributes, or accidents, of individual people which can not and need not be contained in a generic symbol.²¹� This is the same situation with ‘man’ as a generic lexical item for all human beings everywhere. If the conceptual accidents or measurements are known, then it is easy to use the appropriate pronoun. When we are talking about flight attendants (having outlawed ‘stewardess’), the generic referent will still be ‘she’ since the superficial features are readily recalled from experience as being feminine.

Nowadays, we are just as likely to find a male working as a flight attendant and so may actually revert to using ‘him’ in a generic sense whereas ‘she’ or ‘her’ would have been the preferred generic in the past� — a bit of irony on the level of generic reference. The working assumption of the faux grammarians is that bias is transmitted and passed on from one generation to the next through structures in our language� — the assumption that bias, hatred, and antagonisms created our language through the power structures of Western society or some such silliness. It is often difficult to resist seeing a male image or association with particular occupations no matter how well or even how much better a non-gender referent is in use (firefighter/fireman; police officer/policeman); so too with certain traditional female tasks such as nurse, flight attendant, or nanny� — shall we forbid the sexist ‘governess’ in favor of a ‘governor?’ These occupations lend an image of women. Some expressions are so set generically that many do not recognize them: ‘To each his own;’ ‘Oh, boy!;’ ‘It’s everyone for himself!’ These show the sheer indifference of language-structure to sex.

Some believe that expressions using both male and female forms confirm the priority (or superiority or bias) of males because the order puts the masculine before the feminine term: ‘sons and daughters,’ ‘he or she,’ a person can ‘give himself or herself,’ ‘husbands and wives’� — the interesting exception being, of course, ‘ladies and gentlemen.’ Psychologically, certain concepts are seen as preceding others like ‘black and white,’ ‘aunts and uncles,’ ‘mothers and fathers,’ ‘vodka and tonic,’ ‘ladies and gentlemen’� — these pairs don’t occur automatically the other way around.

Curiously, the language police do not believe that these same oppressive structures exist elsewhere or in other ‘exotic’ languages. Radical gender police claim that by changing language through diktat and agenda, thoughts can be changed, ‘power structures’ dismantled, a world without offense architectured by the guidance of a higher moral purpose. This is the only way to maintain the myth that gender and racial tribalism define human-ness.

The symbols used to name concepts are given to us through our native language or ‘linguistic community;’ how we choose to understand those concepts is a different matter. In other words, a misogynist can use ‘she’ or ‘her’ generically in writing and remain a misogynist. I can call my best friend a dumb-ass and I can call an absolute stranger the same, but the meaning of the term is different in each case� — the former is jocular, the latter is an insult. Words are shared and they represent various aspects of reality in a particular context; this is why they are (1) not arbitrary and (2) learnable. We could not imagine coming to grasp any language as children if the words changed at any moment, or if every instance of ‘table’ in our experience had to have its own word, or if at one moment she was a he and the next they was a he and then tomorrow, he became a them. These stable blocks of language are primary and fix the cognitive content of the intellect. The uses to which those words are put (nuance, emphasis, hyperbole, diminutives) are a matter of individual creation and thus secondary effects of one’s linguistic capacity. ‘He’ was not chosen to spite the females of the world (language is not arbitrary); it was not used because ‘males wrote for a male audience’ in some past era (non-sequitor); there was no conscious choice to use it as a generic referent� — it was the generic referent because people as neuter-referents are ‘his’ and ‘him’ grammatically, not because they were/are sexually males.

I challenge anyone to find a language which uses the notional-sex female pronoun as a generic referent. In Arabic (the chic, fashionable campus culture at the moment) the masculine pronoun alone isn’t even enough to posit a generic sense; even the verb must take a masculine marker to mark generic use fully. Pronouns refer to the concept of entities; they are short, economical forms which stand for some being. Instead of repeating five names every time, I can refer to ‘they’ collectively. One would believe that there is no need to have two forms of ‘they’ to specify ‘many men they’ and ‘many women they,’ but some languages do, as in Polish, where women are placed in the inanimate category even in the third person plural ‘they.’ A group of men is oni, but a group consisting of women or children is oné.

Pronouns are grammatically fixed. In the inflected languages, pronouns have to agree with the kind of noun: ‘Where’s the vase? She was here a minute ago’ would be the appropriate construction for languages in which a vase is grammatically ‘feminine;’ or ‘Where’s the carnation I bought you? He was here on the table. I’ll just have to give a rose; she is much prettier anyways.’ Because English does not have classifications for nouns, we use ‘it’ for inanimate things, ‘he’ and ‘she’ for persons. Since a generic person is still an animate being, ‘it’ is not open to us.

The accusation that ‘he’ perpetuates gender bias has no foundation� — theoretically, etymologically, or conceptually. The accusation is malicious in that it attempts to create problems where there were none, and neglects the source of the problems it seeks to remedy by proposing bogus Lilly-the-Pink cures and medicaments.

Some more illustrations through the related phenomena of plural and singular concepts

Just as all verbs must have an agent, so does the reflexive idea of ‘own.’ In most Indo-European languages, the person doing the action of the verb is either redundant or else unnecessary as it is already signified in the verb’s inflection. Since in English we have to specify the verb’s agent, we also have to specify whose ‘own’ for subject agreement:

* ‘A person needs own space and privacy.’

The word ‘own’, though referring back to the subject of the sentence, can not stand alone� — it needs a person marker and ‘his’ fulfills that need. Similarly, for lack of synthetic features which would glue the syntax together, English rigidly demands concord among person and number. Similarly,

* ‘A person needs one’s own space and privacy.’

This does not hold good. Some remark the curious concord of a generic ‘they’ following a generic singular:

‘When someone says that they “did it their way”, it usually means they botched it up.’ Clearly the agreement is from conceptualizing more broadly and differs from the ‘side-stepping’ strategy noted earlier; the idea takes the mind away from any one individual to what most individuals mean in the expression. We will see this again below with ‘everyone’ as a plural concept. To replace ‘someone’ with ‘people’ will not fix anything either since that would indicate a plural-group concept.

Language itself, its structure and form, does not influence the way we think. The error of feminist grammar is the error in the mystical Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that our language structures reality and hence, different cultures perceive phenomena in their physical and social world differently; hence there are different realities. They claim that the gender bias which exists in the world also created the language to reflect that bias. This is the same as believing that language (the linguistic structures of consciousness) determines what and how I perceive the world. In the attempt not to give any impression of coming off as too subjective, they attach a negative fear element and now call their legislation ‘non-biased language’ when there was no tangible bias to begin with linguistically� — you are simply biased de facto and not de jure.

As an example of the relation between concept and form, let us play with a few examples (most of which can be found in Jespersen’s fuller treatment in his Philosophy of Grammar).

‘Either you or I are (is, am?) wrong.’

‘Clive and I went each to our habitation’ (Thackeray, qtd in Jespersen). Is the ‘our’ inclusive or exclusive? The term ‘each’ tells us and can economize to avoid the longer ‘ … each to his own.’

The need to break concord or grammaticality is another instance of how language follows the concept-forming faculty of sense experience and context. Being ‘ungrammatical’ is not always an error but can be a means to economy when the accepted, legislated grammatical paradigm would be un-economical, ambiguous, or just strange. Ambiguity is a logical consequence of language, but it is not the case that ambiguity is the same as illogical (i.e., a slip of reason). Language, as conceptualization of experience, must retain some measure of a loose or sliding fit. When a speaker of any language can not express a thought coherently or adequately, this is the result of carelessness as in classic examples like: ‘Kicked aside and lying under the bed, the professor found his shoes.’ But context still allows us to understand the idea being communicated.

Everybody and nobody also illustrate the process of conceptual thinking. Lacking consistency, we have always had to improvise and use words more like wildcards. At times we might mean plural reference, at other times, with the same form, a singular reference on account of the fact that number may be an issue of semantics or grammar (just as a word can be grammatically plural but singular in meaning: eyeglasses, trousers, scissors, etc or grammatically singular but plural in meaning: bra, fish, deer). The tendency to use ‘There is’ for plurals is also telling: ‘Do you have any beer glasses?� — There’s some in the kitchen.’

Everyone has (sg.) to be in bed by midnight, don’t they? (pl.)

* Everyone has (sg.) to be in bed by midnight, doesn’t he? (sg.)

Everyone was (sg.) there, weren’t they? (pl.)

* Everyone were there.

Did everybody cast their votes? (pl.)

*Did everybody cast his vote? (sg.)

We gave everyone their money back (pl.)

We gave everyone his money back. (sg.)

Everyone has (sg.) been refunded, haven’t they? (pl. tag)

Everyone’s (sg.) ill, aren’t they? (pl.)

* Everyone’s ill, isn’t he?

If anyone disagrees, say so now. (sg. verb)

Nobody calls us anymore. (sg. verb)

Everyone likes pizza (sg. verb), don’t they? (pl. tag)

Everyone/everybody, whether as singular or plural concept, depends upon context and speaker intent, what the speaker wants to say whether the speaker conceives the number of people apart or in a group mass. The meaning does not depend upon any ‘perceptions’ from the people to whom I am referring.

Nobody as plural: ‘Nobody prevents you, do they?’ (Jespersen). Similarly, ‘Nobody is stopping you, are they?’ But note ‘Is nobody going to do anything about it?’ as a singular concept. Clearly, context determines the use of a singular or plural tag. We have inherited from logical analysis a demand for strict formal consistency at the expense of the conceptual level. This logical requirement has been transferred incorrectly to the pronoun gender bias claim. There is no logic in gender in and of itself but only conceptually as personhood.

In England, the plural is understood for groups whereas Stateside, the group is a singular entity.

UK: Manchester United are playing Liverpool.

US: The team is having a difficult start this year.

UK: The training staff are invited to attend.

US: My family is coming over this weekend.

UK: His family were present at the memorial service.

Sometimes there is no difference: The police are here.

Sometimes, the Americans just have to adopt English ways:

My family is coming over tonight (normally)� — but: An Egyptian family invited us to their home (its home?).

Within the same language, a word might have a masculine sense in the singular, yet a neuter sense in the plural:

Whose bicycle is that over there?� — Oh, some kid left it there.

Who trampled over your flowers?� — Some kids that wanted to take a short-cut.

I must emphasize this final point: concepts are not born in the mind and then projected onto some facet of reality for their validation. An unspecified being is not feminine in one sense and then masculine later down the road. I have tried to show this with similar examples of overlap in singular/plural concepts as well as concepts pertaining to the biological sex of their referents. Neuter sense means ‘neither’ and so excludes any notion of sex. Many people, when using the generic pronoun, interrupt their speech to remind us that ‘I meant that in the generic sense.’ To say ‘A person needs his privacy’ and then ‘ … I meant his in the neutral sense’ is absurd, for if it is truly a neuter pronoun (i.e., concept), you can not use it in a male ‘sense’ even when referring to a male. This would be like a woman addressing a group of female colleagues: ‘Okay, guys, let’s go!’ and then exclaiming ‘I meant “guys” in a female sense.’ If the term ‘man’ can be considered biased when used generically, it seems that to be consistent we should include ‘guys’ in the sexist lexicon of forbidden English� — a fact which faux grammarians conveniently ignore.

In conclusion

The idea of a prescribing generic pronoun laws is irrational because it is simply outside the natural process of the language. Language works in context, not ideals or ideologies. There is no reason why a person, male or female, working-class or educated, should fear using thon’s own, native language. It is quite versatile and can express any concept naturally. The ability to use your own language with sophistication and clarity should not be crippled by politically bitter theorists hiding in their ivory towers. The issues and controversies that relate to generic pronouns are all based on politically caustic theories. Those who fret over this issue, thankfully, comprise maybe .01% of the total population of both the USA and UK together. The majority of folks who live the life of the language are not troubled by academic babble from the NEA, MLA, school textbook publishers (especially), the Department of Education, school boards, or any of the other cultish, anti-conceptual language planners and social engineers.

The vast majority of today’s graduates from English departments know little, if any, Latin; they know even less about Old English; they know nothing about Old Norse or Icelandic; they have been taught that the literary canon of English is something to be apologized for; their knowledge of English grammar is superficial but they can swear by highly dubious and questionable theories such as those of Chomsky; they have a smattering of French ‘critical theory’ and ‘post-structuralism’ (which went out of fashion even in Paris back in the late 80s); the term ‘rhetoric’ no longer means the art of persuasion through an understanding of the syllogism and artful linguistic devices, but the propaganda of special interest groups� — and yet somehow they feel competent to speak about generic pronoun use.

In the end, the only practical and educational advice to walk away from the table with is to speak and write thoughtfully. My own beliefs as a native English speaker, experience as an editor and writing teacher, my foreign language study, and experience in my travels of having to put up with misogynists and racists of all kinds and from all places around the globe is that legislation in the way of language planning does not change attitudes� — in fact, it has nothing to do with that chic term ‘perceptions.’ There are just as many misogynists in cultures whose grammars have truly generic pronoun and dual forms as there are in English-speaking countries where the use of him/his as a generic is now punishable as a thought crime … in fact there are generally more sexists in those exotic, purer cultures so popular with academics.

No person will teach a child non-biased behavior or thoughts by instructing it to speak in the so-called ‘non-sexist’ or ‘bias-free’ language. Children are taught meaning through context and action and this is done via content of example, not pronoun form. It is a blessing to those of us who see (have been raised to see) each other as people equally, male-female, black-white, homo-hetero, East-West, old-young, rich-poor, and not as pronouns and tribal clans, groups, minorities and majorities, indigenous and foreign, that the generic image is naturally in mind from any pronoun� — he, one, thon, or otherwise. Understande sē ðe wille.

Our problems are social maladies; not linguistic ones.

Reference Notes

1.� � J. Mitchell Morse, The Irrelevant English Teacher (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1972).

2.� John M. Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), esp. chapters 1 and 3.