What is a He/She?

The article Do You Have a Cow About He/She/It? addresses one of my biggest grips about how some people have tried to screw up the English language further then it is already is. That is the use of the he/she creature that doesn’t exist in nature. You can use ‘their’ and ‘they’ or even ‘he’ or ‘she’, but he/she is never correct.

Proper English says that if you don’t know the gender of the person you are speaking of, that person is identified as a he, never a she or a he/she. The use of ‘they’ or ‘them’ has slowly come into common use when gender is unknown or could be either male or female. I prefer this use although both words are really plurals.

But, I’ve always felt that since the words ‘man’ and ‘men’ are both contained in the words ‘woman’ and ‘women’, that identifying someone as a doorman, chairman or postman are all really gender neutral when viewed in that light.

So – I’ll continue to use ‘he’ as I was taught in my English class, but slip in a ‘they’ or ‘them’ and perhaps a 'their' when it seems appropriate. But never will I use he/she. It’s just bad English.

Ken