Glenn Maynard wrote:
On Sun, Jan 30, 2005 at 07:27:26PM +0000, Helen Faulkner wrote:
Ugh. English has no gender-neutral third person singular pronoun, which means that the use of "he" and "his" for an unspecific third party assumesnothing about his gender.
Well, actually that is incorrect. They as a singular, gender neutral pronoun has been used in English for centuries (surely, if Shakespeare used it, its good enough for Debian). See, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Your objections to [1] and [2] are patently false. (Your rewritings, arbitrarily switching between plural and singular forms, are clumsy.)
Well, I was trying to go with the style used in the rest of those documents and in much of the Debian documentation. But of course there are other available solutions, and I don't claim to be a good writer. You are welcome to suggest more preferable rewordings :)
There are useful things for Debian to spend time on. This is not one of them.
Nobody asked you to spend time on this ;) Helen.