Sorry for the past week's posting slowdown - I've been busy with the first week of classes, training for my new job (I'm working with a prof on an emotional competence assessment for preschoolers), and banging away on the piano. The first week of classes tends to be especially busy because students at U of C shop around so much - I myself still haven't figured out what it is I'm going to enroll in (eg I'm still tossing around the idea of taking Daniel Drezner's global governance class). Things should be a little more manageable this week.
I can't resist mentioning, apropos of this post, that I've recently encountered the pronoun she used as the unmarked third person singular in three separate contexts - once in a professor's lecture, once in a book on suburbanization, and once in the training materials for a survey related to the one I mentioned above. This would certainly seem to controvert Language Hat's claim that it's "useless as actual communication."
OK, OK, so I exaggerated. I do that sometimes. What I should have said was: "Although you can communicate your meaning by using 'she' as generic third person, if you're hoping to influence general usage it is a quixotic quest. You will run across fellow quixotes from time to time, and you will all appreciate each other's efforts, but the practice will never catch on among the general populace." I could, of course, be wrong. It happened once, back in '69...
But that's the point - these folks weren't quixotes at all, they're very mainstream sources. The prof and the book (Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth T. Jackson) are in policy. And the survey training materials are put out by no less authoritative a source than the US government. I think this is a genuine alternative, one that people have adopted. I'm surprised you're so quick to dismiss it as marginal.
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