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Old 05-25-2008, 03:05 PM   #34
Patricia
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I agree that it is odd to use 'he' for non-gender specific statements. If you were to say of a person that he is pregnant then eyebrows would be raised, even (especially?) if the person was a woman.

A lot of people just use 'they' instead of 'he or she.'
E.g. 'A person should remember where their towel is.'

Recasting sentences in the third person plural is sometimes an option: 'People should remember where their towels are.'

I'm quite taken with Marge Piercy's solution (in her utopian/dystopian novel, Woman on the Edge of Time). She suggests a gender-neutral pronoun: per. e.g. 'A person should remember where per towel is.'

(Somebody will now remind me that a person should remember not to end sentences with a preposition. But this is imposing an anachronistic Latinate structure upon English, which is not a Romance language at all.)
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