@maxdancona,
Quote:To artificially force an abrupt change in a language for political reasons is nonsense
What is it that causes people to rush to display their ignorance on language issues, Max?
This silly rule was exactly that, an attempt to force an abrupt change in language for social/snotty reasons. It never took because people can't follow unnatural, forced, concocted rules. We all have natural rules of grammar in our brains.
Long before this bit of nonsense, this falsehood was invented, the English language had a better alternative, a much clearer, a much more sensible way to deal with this.
Quote:The primary goal of language is communication, and English makes good use of "he" as a gender neutral pronoun.
Precisely, so why use a nonsensical, made up rule when there has always been a completely natural alternative.
Quote:"To each his own" is very concise and easy to understand. It is hardly a sexist statement.
No one is suggesting that that phrase be abolished. The problem comes from people who have vainly tried to abolish an existing natural rule of English, which, of course, never works.
Quote:Most of my fellow linguists, in fact, would say that it is absurd even to talk about a language changing for the better or the worse. When you have the historical picture before you, and can see how Indo-European gradually slipped into Germanic, Germanic into Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon into the English of Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and then Henry James, the process of linguistic change seems as ineluctable and impersonal as continental drift.
From this Olympian point of view, not even the Norman invasion had much of an effect on the structure of the language,
and all the tirades of all the grammarians since the Renaissance sound like the prattlings of landscape gardeners who hope by frantic efforts to keep Alaska from bumping into Asia.
http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/correct/decline/
