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Originally Posted by QuantumIguana
Baron goes on to describe how relics of these sex-neutral terms survive in some British dialects of Modern English (for example "hoo" for "she", in Yorkshire), and sometimes a pronoun of one gender might be applied to a person or animal of the opposite gender.[/I]
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This is a relic of Old English, which had grammatical gender (as most European languages still do). There are other remnants of grammatical gender to be found in both Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Eg, Matthew 5:13:
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Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?
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"his savour" is not "personification" of salt, but applying grammatical gender to the noun "salt". The KJV was deliberately written in an archaic style for the time, which is why, for example, it uses 2nd-person "-eth" endings, such as "goeth", rather than "goes", even though "goes" had more or less taken over as the standard form by the early 17th century when it was written.