Re: Comment on introduction pages

[Mike Frysinger]

On Thursday, June 03, 2010 22:26:49 Eric Blake wrote:
> On 06/03/2010 06:28 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:
> >> Thanks for the report.  However, English is one of those silly languages
> >> where the pronoun "his" can have a neuter sense rather than masculine,
> >> and this is one of those cases.  Politically correct pundits are trying
> >> to eradicate that usage, but personally, I'm still of the opinion that
> >> "his" looks better than "his/hers", as long as you understand that the
> >> usage is not locking down the gender of the antecedent.
> > 
> > The long-standing gender-neutral pronoun in English is singular "their,"
> > 
> > as used by such people as Jane Austen.  I would rewrite the sentence as:
> >     "The developer expresses the recipe to build their package in a
> >     Makefile"
> 
> A pedant would claim that it mixes singular and plural, but you are
> correct that it is in common enough usage that "their package" doesn't
> grate as badly on my nerves as "his/her package".

his/her is indeed garbage
-mike

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