Pop-Culture Linguistic Change
English doesn’t have a gender-neutral singular personal pronoun. (“It” is neuter, not neutral.) There’s a movement afoot to create one, I think. This particular manifestation of the movement, from the comic Boomerangs, is new to me:
I seem to recall “thon” offered as a gender-neutral term several years back, but haven’t seen it since. I predict we’re not going to get a new word. Back when women’s lib was a new movement, there was a push to use the slightly awkward “he or she” and “him or her” to replace the generic “he” and “him,” and that has become the most common approach to this challenge. I think that’s a reasonable solution, we’ll get used to it, and things will settle down.
What’s your opinion? Don’t be too hard on me for using the term “pop culture.”
Personally, I think singular-they is becoming a lot more popular due to the awkwardness inherent in “he/she” and “he or she”. It also has significant historical precedent stretching back into Elizabethan English.
You might be right! I forgot to mention “they,” and it does indeed go a long way back.
“It” is also allowed sometimes when you don’t know the gender, and when applied to animals. It’s not uncommon to hear “Is it a boy or a girl?”