Roderick Ramage wonders whether lawyers should take the lead in promoting a new gender-neutral pronoun
Have the pupils at middle school and high school in Baltimore solved our linguistic dilemma? What does this sentence, in the rule book of a care home, mean?
“Where a complainant notifies the other residents of a complaint, they must lodge a section 12 notice within 14 days.”
You can tell that it was written by a sociologist or social worker because of the politically correct “they”. A journalist would be just as likely to have used “they” instead of thinking what he or she means to say, but is unlikely to have been commissioned to write a care home rule book. According to the New Scientist: “The lack of a gender neutral personal pronoun in English has bothered people for at least two centuries.” A strict grammarian, parsing that sentence, would have no difficulty in ascertaining what it says. The operative words are “they must lodge a…notice”, the word “they” is plural and, as the
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