Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
Thanks for that link, Bookworm-Girl. I can see the value of having a gender neutral pronoun.
I still suggest that it was not in use 50 years ago, even though it had been used in earlier times. The language keeps changing.
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Its use was proscribed by many 50 years ago, part of the same mindset that insisted that splitting infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions is wrong. David Crystal has a really good section in his book
The Fight For English on the challenge of helping English teachers who were brought up in that ill-informed prescriptivist system to adjust to the more descriptivist style of English grammar instruction being adopted in many places over the last couple of decades.