Why do grammarians have a problem with using “their” or “them” when referring to a person of unknown gender? “He or she” seems to defeat the purpose of using pronouns in the first place. I mean we use “you” to refer to a single person or a group of persons.
I saw a flyer from school that used the phrase “your son or daughter” about ten times! what’s wrong with “your child”
Lots of grammarians are conservative. “They” or “their” designate plurals, so they object to their use.
The elegant solution to this is to pluralize the antecedents:
“Your child should bring his or her lunch.”
gets changed to
“All children should bring their lunch.”
Says the same thing and keeps the grammarians happy. Unfortunately, those who write the notices don’t know enough to use this simple fix.
While I am well aware that the use of “their” in this way is technically incorrect, when compared to other proposed solutions to the “unknown singluar” problem, this solecism does the least violence to the language overall (consider the clumseyness of repeated invocations of “his or her”, or such abombinations as “s/he”).
Therefore, I support this useage.
Not all grammarians object to the singular “their” usage. This page has some nice background on its development.
Every time the his/her/their argument comes up, I wonder why people seem to forget the words “a” and “the” exist.
What’s wrong with “Every child should bring a lunch” or even “Every child should bring lunch”?
Because then the children will start bringing other people’s lunches, and it’ll be a mess. You’ve got to spell the rules out with those kids, or they’ll walk all over you.
JeffB: that’s one of my favourite grammar pages. Prescriptive grammar is a mindset that often doesn’t reflect genuine etymology or precedent, only the prejudices of a few influential language pundits in the 1700s.
All children should bring their lunches. Or else you’re going to have some mighty upset children, what with their all having to share one lunch.
What? Each child is going to bring all their lunches for the week?
Each child should bring their own lunch. OR, All children should bring their own lunch.
Peace.
Sorry, moriah, but to me, both of those options means 30 kids squabbling over one peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.
I’ve always wondered why people get in such a twist over using a default gender in the case of an unknown. It was so much simpler to say “each child shall bring his own lunch” than to raise charges of sexism and exclusionary language and therefore make every written document a potential minefield.
Other languages don’t seem to have a problem with this. In Spanish, if you are referring to a group of people, it is only given a feminine gender if every member of the group is female. A single male member of the group renders the entire group as masculine. I could easily be wrong, but I don’t hear a lot of complaints about this.
I just don’t see the big deal. Maybe it’s because I’m a guy… 
Kizarvexius, I don’t get it either. To me, the use of the generic “his” sounds perfectly fine and inclusive. On the other hand, the phrase “you guys” gets parsed by my brain as “you males,” so anytime I hear it refer to a group that has female members, I have to rewind and parse it again. This one seems to me to be so much more deserving of derision than a generic pronoun used where our language doesn’t have a separate one for unisex situations.
I used to be a member of a board where many of the subscribers used “gender neutral” language.
So he/she, his/her, him/her, himself/herself were: “zie”, “zer”… “zieself”? Oh, hell if I can remember it all!
I found it utterly incomprehensible! Especially in complex sentences and paragraphs. I understand the intention of it, but it really sacrificed clarity. I could never figure out who was talking about whom. Maybe it was a matter of getting used to it.
Now, I must excuse zyself to finish my lunch.
I always have to laugh when people try so hard to make people speak “correctly” when some of the rules were inserted into the English language by people who thought it should be more “latinate” (like no double negatives). Prescriptive grammarians are like salmon trying to move upstream against a current that is too strong, they fight so very hard, but they get no where.
I guess I’d be getting nowhere if I criticized the grammar in your post … 
Still grammatically incorrect. Try this:
All children should bring my own lunch. I prefer lobster.
Exactly. The more usages you investigate the more instances you find in which using “he” “him” or “his” as inclusive creates false impressions in peoples’ minds. (e.g., The gynocologist will examine his patient in the third room.)
It was accepted as “correct” when the culture was so overwhelmingly male-dominated that the few female exceptions were culturally meaningless. That era has long gone. Continuing the usage today is simply an insult.
Gynecologist. Who put that Submit button over there?
I’ve found the convention picked up from a Nomic player of “e, er, erself” to be relatively easy to read. I doubt it’ll catch on, but when e uses it it’s fairly easy to understand er, as the sound is near enough to an existing word to be covered by the ‘typo’ part of your brain
That was only used for hypothetical people, or people of indeterminate gender - I see the advantages of having completely gender-neutral language, but I really doubt it’ll happen. OTOH, when discussing several people, maybe they should be assigned pronouns in some arbitrary way, maybe “Bee, Cee, Dee” in order of appearance (except not that stupid ) so you can tell them apart…
I agree with Exapno. I think it would be rather difficult to demonstrate that usage of masculine pronouns as gender-neutral do not carry a set of male expectations with them.
But, as it stands, it seems using the plural for gender-neutral is the way our language is headed, and it’s the most elegant solution without having to resort to abominations such as “s/he,” “he or she”, any number of neologisms, or even, one of my favorite schizophrenic displays of literary lunacy, switching between “he” and “she” in every other paragraph.
Interestingly enough, epicene pronouns have been proposed since the mid-19th centure, according to the American Heritage Book of English Usage. So it’s not just a late-20th century PC or feminist phenomenon.
Also, according to the article, some British dialects still use English’s gender-neutral nominative pronoun, “a” or “ha.”