[vivaldirules]

In: _______ (doesn't exist, apparently)

Out: 'he or she', 'she or he', 'he/she', 's/he', 'he' and 'she' used alternately, 'him/her', 'his/hers', 'it', 'one' or 'someone'

People used to write 'he' when they did not intend to specify gender and really meant 'he or she' either because the subject's gender wasn't known or wasn't important. That irritated many people, including me, and I've witnessed at least 35 years of intense but failed attempts to remove unintented references to gender from written and spoke English.

The most laughable attempts are using 'he' in the first paragraph, 'she' in the next, and continue alternating thereafter. To me, that's like writing a math paper and, not having a symbol for ± (either positive or negative), setting all the equations to +1 in the first secton and those in the next section equal to -1. Now continue alternating. Hey, maybe the reader will pick up on the intended meaning - not! Another bad attempt is using 'it'. Most of us don't like it when people (or even dogs) are refered to as genderless and inanimate.

Something better is certainly possible and a reasonable mozzling seems in order. Of course, it will need to be simple, sensible, and unoffensive to become accepted and appropriate possessive and objective forms will be needed, too. Using "The Google" (I asked Dick to do it for me; I don't exactly get all this mousing and typing and clicking thing - I never had to before as your President; well, except once when I looked up what a nucular weapon really looks like since we never did find any WMDs), I see that people have proposed using 'em', 'sie', 'zie', 'e', 'ey', and others. As weird as these strike me, it seems like something is needed.

So whaddaya think? Time to change the language and add a word or two to it (don't we all the time?) or continue to live in confusion and inexactitude (I used The Google for that one)?