One of the weaknesses of the English language is that it presents no way to refer to person without being gender-specific. The use s/he and his/her, while accomplishing this goal, gets cumbersome. Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan put it like this:
Awareness of this problem is not new, and English Prof. Dennis Baron of the University of Illinois has a lengthy post describing how English users have tried to resolve it over the past 150 years. He writes:
Link via Marginal Revolution | Guardian Link | Photo of statute of Samuel Johnson by Flickr user ell brown used under Creative Commons license
The whole pronouns-must-agree-with-antecedents thing causes me utter agony. Do you know how many paragraphs I’ve had to tear down and rebuild because you can’t say, “Somebody left their cheese in the fridge”, so you say, “Somebody left his/her cheese in the fridge”, but then you need to refer to his/her cheese several times thereafter and your writing ends up looking like an explosion in a pedants’ factory?
Awareness of this problem is not new, and English Prof. Dennis Baron of the University of Illinois has a lengthy post describing how English users have tried to resolve it over the past 150 years. He writes:
In 1890, a report in the Rocky Mountain News recommends hi, hes, hem, as a paradigm that will be “readily taken up and assimilated spontaneously,” though of course that didn’t happen, and so, after more than thirty years of proposals for hi, ir, hizer, ons, e, and ith, no word took hold, in 1894 the paper called on the state legislature to create a gender-neutral pronoun to “correct a well known imperfection of our language.” And shortly thereafter, a reader suggests a “bi-personal pronoun,” either the coordinates he or she, his or her, him or her, or the compounds hesher, hiser, himer: “It was particularly appropriate that Colorado should do so, because the ladies are on a political equality with men.”
And in 1897 a Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper reports on a Massachusetts law that forbids certain kinds of feathers to be worn in hats, a law presumably aimed at women but which employs a masculine pronoun. This presents a problem for the Boston police commissioner, who insists that the masculine pronoun does not include the feminine: “I don’t believe I could arrest a woman on that law,” he said. “The masculine pronoun does not specifically include the women. The law including both usually says ‘person’ or ‘persons,’ but this one simply says ‘his.’”
Link via Marginal Revolution | Guardian Link | Photo of statute of Samuel Johnson by Flickr user ell brown used under Creative Commons license
However, I consciously choose to use that construct, because it's otherwise too clumsy to have "he or she" over and over. Or I just shorten it to "he" and trust that people can just get over the lack of the "she."
"singular they" is deprecated by a few authorities, but is supported by most informed grammarians, and has often been used by great writers over the centuries
or more harshly:
use of forms of they with singular antecedents is attested in English over hundreds of years, in writers as significant as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and Wilde. The people (like the perennially clueless Strunk and White) who assert that such usage is "wrong" simply haven't done their literary homework and don't deserve our attention.
Agreed. The singular gender-neutral pronoun in English is "it".
Making up new words instead of using what we already have is ridiculous and unnecessary. Just because "it" doesn't sound like him/her/he/she, doesn't mean we have to make up new words that take the place of "it" that will "sound" better...
It's just silly.
"Somebody left their cheese in the fridge" becomes
"Somebody left cheese in the fridge", or "Somebody left some cheese in the fridge", if that meter appeals to you.
If you're talking, it all depends on how much thinking you do before the words come out.
Problem solved.
Given the Grauniad's legendart inability to get through a single sentence without making a howling error I don't see Lucy Mangan's problem.
That's the great thing about language: it changes over time to fill its own conceptual gaps, and the scholars often take generations to codify it. "They/their/theirs" will be considered formal usage in a matter of fifty years or I'll eat my hat.
'A person should not ruin their writing by following stupid rules.'