response 26 of 63:

Dec 26 19:26 UTC 1995

(it's true...sometimes we drive to New York and are amazed
by nice toll takers!)

response 30 of 63:

Jan 25 00:53 UTC 1996

Would it do to simply insert the word "person" where you would
have used "girl" or "woman"?  Maybe not a perfect fit for every
occurrence but I find it works most of the time.

response 32 of 63:

Jan 25 05:20 UTC 1996

Really, people!  Do you folks honestly believe that there are any
gender-free collective terms out there?  What have y'all been 
smoking?  That's why we need "guys":  the words "folks", "y'all"
and "people" don't exist.  :)

response 34 of 63:

Jan 25 07:01 UTC 1996

And besides, I say a lot of irrelevant stuff, and so do a lot of people, and
sometimes it turns out to be relevant after all.  I'm not in favor of
censoring irrelevence.

response 36 of 63:

Jan 25 17:34 UTC 1996

I use "you guys" to include whomever I'm addressing, regardless of gender.
The third person singular may be more of a problem.

response 38 of 63:

Jan 27 20:06 UTC 1996

"Hey, you" usually works for me =)

response 40 of 63:

Jan 29 19:39 UTC 1996

I use they, them, and themself, and drive the prescriptivists nuts.  :)
"A student, when discovering they are falling behind in their classes,
are responsible for finxing the problem themself.  The TA will help them
if necessary."
OF course this example could be fixed by changing "A student" to
"Students" but other cases aren't that easy... *shrug*

response 42 of 63:

Jan 30 00:25 UTC 1996

Right, Michael... the latter is the sort where singluar "they" comes
in handy.

response 44 of 63:

Jan 31 14:06 UTC 1996

I sent the text of #43 to my friend Ken (klhodges@umich.edu), who's an English
graduate student.  Here's what he responded:

I don't have a source which says explicitly that "they" could never be 
used for the singular, but I do not think it was ever correct to do so.
The Old English pronoun for "she" (seo) and for "they" (hie) were
declined similarly, and this similarity continued into middle English
until the form "she" took over, but I think they were always treated as
distinct words (just as we separate "bear"--to carry or endure--and 
"bear"--a large fierce animal).  
     Moreover, there are reasons why "you" serves as both singular
and plural, and I can see none why (historically) "they" should be
both singular and plural.  English orinigally had singular and plural
forms of "you" (thu or thou and ge or ye).  For some reason, it became
good manners to address someone of higher rank as "you" instead of 
"thou" (one theory--which I've seen no evidence for--traces this back
via the romance languages to the split of the Roman empire into eastern
and western empire, so that one would physically talk to only one emperor 
at a time while in principle addressing both, but I don't believe this
explanation).  This split between "thou" and "you" lasts (with
complications) through the Renaissance, but the pressure of good manners
led to the extinction of "thou."  (it's preserved in certain religious
sects like quakers precisely because they did not wish to do undue honor
to fellow mortals).
     I am less knowledgeable about the use of "we" as a singular, and
i suspect it's history is varied.  Queen Victoria was fond of using it,
but it is not a royal necessity: Queen Elizabeth I often used the regular
singulars (I, me, my).  I suspect its primary use is rhetorical, either
implying expected consent or that the speaker speaks from a public
position as representative (completely consistent with some ideas of
monarchy).
     "They" in English never got caught up in social social mannerisms,
so there was no pressure for it to function as both similar and plural.
(In German, something different happened.  "Du" and "ihr" are the 
equivalents of "thu" and "ye", but it became polite to address people, not
as plural, but as third-person, so "sie"--they--became the polite pronoun,
both sigular and plural second person).  Furthermore, "they" itself is
a Scandinavian borrowing, replacing the Old English "hie."  It spread from
the northeast midlands, nominative first, then the oblique cases (them, 
their), so it slowly displaced the native forms.  It would be surprising 
to see it suddenly displacing singular forms as well, and I haven't seen
an instance of this, medieval or Renaissance--and after the Renaissance,
the prescriptive grammarians took over, so I would be surprised to see it
later.
     It is only now that "they is getting used for the singular, and 
that's to avoid using "he" as an indefinite pronoun, in sentences like
"Any student is poor, so they take out loans."  This is understandable,
since the singular "any student" does stand for a large class of people,
and it avoids "Any student is poor, so he takes out loans," which may
seem sexist.
     This is probably much mroe than you wanted to know, but I don't know
what you Grex people are debating, so I thought I should be complete.
 
--Kenneth

response 46 of 63:

Jan 31 23:29 UTC 1996

Ken wasn't being patronizing, brighn, I just didn't give him much context.
I don't think we should use they for the third person singular precisely
because it already means something.  If we really want a gender-neutral
singular pronoun, I think we ought to make one up from scratch.

But all this avoids my point, that deliberate vagueness is not a good
solution, in my opinion.  The solution I proposed to the problem in #0 was
to be more specific, not more vague.  Is that so wrong?  Perhaps this is my
problem with "politcal correctness" in general.  A common replacement for
the old term "cripple" is "handicapped".  Which always leads me to wonder,
"handicapped how?"  There are a lot of ways to be handicapped.  Wouldn't it
be better to replace "crippled" with "needs a wheelchair to get around", or
"has only one good arm", or whatever's appropriate?  The difference being
that "handicapped" contains less information than the original phrase, but the
other phrases contain more.